In the end, I was only on hold with the Trump Mobile customer service line for about 13 minutes. I’d been offered the opportunity to simply leave a number for an agent to call me back, due to “unprecedented demand,” but my extreme reluctance to give anyone affiliated with the president my contact information left me listening to a limp jazz instrumental loop for what I felt was a perfectly precedented amount of time. Maybe there is a massive number of people ready to ditch their wireless provider and follow the president on this new venture, but I’ve honestly been on hold with CVS longer.
Once on the phone with an agent, I was quick to learn that this new side hustle was at least refreshingly free of Donald Trump’s signature bombast. There was no braggadocio; no outrageous claims being made about the phone’s capabilities. Instead, I was treated to that other signature Trumpian quality: the unreadiness for prime time that those of us who lived through the Covid pandemic knew all too well. But this time, it also comes with the stink of self-dealing, if not outright corruption.
What is Trump Mobile? First and foremost, it’s a very gaudy, very gold-looking mobile device—most renderings show a screen emblazoned with the president’s name, an American flag, and the “Make America Great Again” motto. The exact model name is the “T1 Phone 8002,” and no, I don’t know why they’ve skipped “8001” but I wouldn’t be surprised if it all has something to do with obscure white-supremacist lore. The phone can allegedly be yours for $499 (they are taking $100 preorders). Trump Mobile is also a wireless service that you can join right now with your current device, if you’re so inclined, for—sigh— $47.45 a month.
The agent I spoke with wasn’t prepared to do a side-by-side comparison between the iPhone and Trump’s wares. (Strange because they were in many ways comparable—at least on paper.) She could tell me nothing about cloud storage. She knew the screen dimensions and the weight of the phone but could only add that “it looks like it had the standard thickness.” The Verge’s David Pierce (who calls the phone “bad and impossible”) reported that there was no processor listed on the website for the phone, and I was unable to get any clarification on this matter beyond the assurance that this was going to be an Android phone. Gen Z can rejoice, however, because Trump is bringing back headphone jacks.
Of course, the most important question was the one I asked first—and one she couldn’t answer: Where was this phone going to be made? After all, the major selling point of this whole enterprise is that the Trump phone was going to be made right here in America. Instead of cheerful affirmation, I got a long, suspicious pause followed by a plaintive, “I don’t know.” That’s fine. With Trump, it pays to be suspicious; you’d do well to keep yourself unassociated with his central claims. But the salient point is this: Even as he collapses the government, shreds the economy, and potentially takes us to war, the president is at all times expanding his scam empire.
My experience with Trump Mobile seems pretty typical—though I wasn’t willing to actually put my credit card at risk for journalism, sorry. The Washington Post’s Shira Ovide said that while Trump Mobile successfully charged her for joining Trump’s wireless service, it charged her more than the listed price and she hasn’t been able to use it yet. 404 Media’s Joseph Cox attempted to make a $100 down payment on the Trump phone itself (due to hit the market in September), only to be billed $64.70 and sent a cryptic confirmation email. “It is the worst experience I’ve ever faced buying a consumer electronic product and I have no idea whether or how I’ll receive the phone,” he wrote.
And experts, asked by CNBC’s Arjun Kharpal to weigh in on the likelihood that this phone will be made in the United States, respond with a resounding LOL. “There is no way the phone was designed from scratch, and there is no way it is going to be assembled in the U.S. or completely manufactured in the U.S.,” said one, adding, “That is completely impossible.” Says another, “The U.S. does not have local manufacturing capabilities readily available.” In fact, all signs point to the inconvenient truth that China’s vaunted manufacturing hubs will have to be involved.
If Trump has a magic power, it’s that no matter how much evidence you marshal in the service of letting the buyer beware, the president still manages to get fools to part with their money pretty regularly. Whether it’s for Trump steaks or the Trump presidency, the one constant is the multitudes willing to be his marks. Frankly, even Trump’s self-conception borders on the level of delusion necessary to con oneself. His own recollections of dealmaking derring-do, when probed, tend to reveal a disastrous self-pantsing.
But maybe the Trump phone is more than meets the eye. As Business Insider reported this week, Mark Cuban thinks that it has something to do with the Trump family’s emerging interests in cryptocurrency:
“I think the smart game they are probably playing is to put a crypto wallet on the phone that leverages WLF, $Trump, and their stable coins,” Cuban posted in response to the product launch. WLF is a reference to crypto firm World Liberty Financial, which is connected with the Trumps.
“Whatever transactions they can create [generate] fees for them, and there are so many ways to sell things and pre-load whatever they want,” he added.
Cuban may be onto something. Crypto has become the new, transcendent dimension of Trump’s scam empire. This week, Eric Trump announced that the family is planning to start “American Bitcoin,” a “company focused on Bitcoin mining, the business of running energy-guzzling machines to generate new coins.” Alongside Trump’s interest in WLF and his emoluments clause–busting memecoins, the president is now tightly entangled in what The New York Times refers to as a “business portfolio … fraught with conflicts of interest that have blurred the boundary between government and industry.”
Between his own up-to-the-gills involvement with the industry and his orders to have both the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission effectively stand down on policing the industry, the president’s capacity for self-dealing and favor trading has reached steroidal new highs. As Harvard University’s go-to expert on authoritarian regimes Steven Levitsky told The Guardian this week, “I have never seen such open corruption in any modern government anywhere.”
Perhaps the most distressing thing about this is the extent to which Democrats are helping to further Trump’s ends. This week, 18 Senate Democrats helped pass the “GENIUS Act,” which is essentially the crypto industry’s version of Gramm-Leach-Bliley. As University of California-Berkeley economist Barry Eichengreen describes at length, the GENIUS Act would bring widespread mayhem in the way it would grant “hundreds—perhaps even thousands—of American companies” the power to issue their own bespoke cryptocurrencies. “Imagine Walmart issuing a Walmartcoin, and Amazon doing the same with an Amazoncoin, enabling them to bypass the banking system and credit card networks,” he writes.
While the idea may seem dizzily postmodern, Eichengreen says that these proposed arrangements bear “an uncanny resemblance to the way America’s monetary system functioned from the mid-1830s until the Civil War,” when “bank failures, personal bankruptcies and financial instability” were part of daily life. “Lawmakers should think twice before passing this piece of legislation,” he writes. Whoops!
Trump might be the nation’s biggest problem right now, but the crypto industry ranks high on the list. As The New Republic’s Paige Oamek reported last September, Washington has lately been flooded with crypto cash: “Crypto companies spent over $121 million to sway elections during [the 2024 election] cycle,” she wrote. “By comparison, since the Citizens United ruling in 2010, the fossil fuel industry has collectively spent $176 million over 14 years of election cycles.”
With that kind of filthy lucre sloshing around, it’s not hard to buy off some Democrats. As The Lever reported this week, the crypto industry has purchased key allies, in the form of scheming strategists who’ve spun through the government-to-private-sector revolving door, now coaching Democratic lawmakers in the art of offering “symbolic anti-corruption amendments” knowing that they would, in the end, be “dead on arrival, since the language would likely be voted down by Republicans.” I suppose that in this way, Trump has done the impossible: He’s brought both parties together in a rare demonstration of bipartisan comity. Too bad, then, that it’s all in the furtherance of the president’s corrupt self-enrichment.
This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.
The post Trump Just Expanded His Tawdry Empire of Scams appeared first on New Republic.
