President Donald Trump declared that he doesn’t “believe in telephones” hours after his company announced that an official Trump-branded smartphone will soon hit the market.
Reporters gathered around the president aboard Air Force One early Tuesday morning after he cut short his trip to the G7 summit in Canada to return to Washington, D.C., amid escalating tit-for-tat bombings between Israel and Iran.
“What can you do in Washington that you couldn’t do in Canada?” one reporter asked, eliciting a leery response from the president.
“Just be a little bit more well-versed,” he began. “Not having to use telephones so much, because I don’t believe in telephones.”
He added a paranoid rebuttal to the press, saying: “Because people like you listen to them, you know, so being on the scene is much better.”
His comments were all the more strange given that his family business announced hours earlier that it will soon provide “Trump Mobile” cell service and sell a Trump-branded smartphone to “real Americans.”
The Trump Organization said its smartphone will be known as “T1” and will be gold in color.
Its website claims the device will also be etched with an American flag and be manufactured domestically. However, reports soon emerged that the $499 iPhone lookalike would have to be at least partly manufactured in China.
Tinglong Dai, a professor of operations management and business analytics at Johns Hopkins University, told The Wall Street Journal that the United States can’t make a complete smartphone at the moment. That capability would take at least five years, he added.
“There’s absolutely no way you could make the screen, get that memory, camera, battery, everything” in the U.S. right now, he said.
After the announcement, Trump Organization executive vice president Eric Trump quickly had to temper expectations that the first devices would be produced stateside.
“Eventually, all the phones can be built in the United States of America,” the president’s second-born son told right-wing podcaster Ben Shapiro.
“We have to bring manufacturing back to America. So, our ethos is, ‘Built for America by Americans. Do it cheaper. Do it better.’”
MAGA diehards can already preorder the device, scheduled for release in September.
Despite Trump’s propensity to fire off reams of Truth Social posts, he is not very tech-savvy, according to reports. Madeleine Westerhout, a former aide, previously said he’d write his desired tweets on paper before sliding the page to his minions to do the rest.
He views emails as “a distraction” and was using “bicycle messengers” at the Trump Organization until around 2012, insiders said. “He is very old school,” Roger Stone, a longtime friend of the president, told Politico in 2016.
The site reported during his first White House term that he is “sort of a Luddite,” referring to 19th-century English textile workers who protested against the introduction of new machinery that threatened their jobs.
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