At a glitzy event at Trump Tower on June 16, 2025, Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump announced the launch of a new “all-American” cell phone service called Trump Mobile, with a flagship golden phone soon to follow.
An estimated 600,000 people paid $100 deposits for the T1 Phone, which is priced at $499 and slated to launch in August 2025.
Yet, nearly nine months later, the phone hasn’t been released, there is no release date listed on the Trump Mobile website, and it may not actually be made in the U.S.
Read more: All the Things Trump Has Put His Name and Face on as President
The Trump Mobile website pushed the phone’s release date back from summer 2025 to November, to December and to mid-March of this year, to now removing a release date altogether.
Trump Mobile also updated its “Preorder Deposit Terms and Conditions” on April 6, 2026, which now makes clear that a preorder deposit “provides only a conditional opportunity if Trump Mobile later elects, in its sole discretion, to offer the Device for sale.”
The terms continue, “A deposit is not a purchase, does not constitute acceptance of an order, does not create a contract for sale, does not transfer ownership or title interest, does not allocate or reserve specific inventory, and does not guarantee that a Device will be produced or made available for purchase.”
And while the terms do say that Trump Mobile will issue a refund of the deposit if it cancels a product outright, they also state that the company is not liable for delays caused by “parts shortages or hold-ups with regulators.”
“Hey, Trump supporter here. This one goes out to Don Jr. and Eric,” one scorned customer and professed Trump supporter said in a now-viral TikTok video posted in January. “Where the f–k’s my phone? I ordered three—no, four—gold Trump phones in the summer.”
TIME has reached out to Trump Mobile for comment.
No longer ‘Made in the USA’?
The two Trump brothers emphasized in their announcement that Trump Mobile products would be “all-American”—with the phones manufactured in the United States and the Trump Mobile customer service headquarters based in St. Louis.
“We don’t want to do that overseas. We don’t want to do that in India,” Eric Trump, who serves as executive vice president of the Trump Organization, told Fox Business in June.
Trump Mobile did not specify where or how these phones would be made, confusing experts and consumers since the only phone made in America at the time, the Liberty Phone, cost $2,000.
Since then, Trump Mobile has dropped the made in America claim, adopting a more subdued description of being “designed with American values in mind,” an “American-proud design,” and “shaped by American innovation.”
Trump’s family venture announcement came as his Administration implemented a massive tariff regime, which he said at the time was to fight back against “unfair” trading practices with our allies abroad, and to restore U.S. manufacturing.
“Remember the army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones?” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said on “Face the Nation” in April 2025. “That kind of thing is going to come to America.”
What does the phone look like?
The T1 Phone design advertised on the website is a gold phone running Android, adorned with an American flag and the Trump Mobile logo.
It is still advertised as a phone with a “fingerprint sensor and AI Face Unlock,” a 6.78-inch touchscreen display, quick charging, and a 50 megapixel main camera.
While the current design looks slightly different from previous iterations of the gold phone, the website still directs customers to the same waitlist to pay a deposit.
The post The Golden ‘Trump Phone’ Has Been Repeatedly Delayed and Will No Longer Be Made in the U.S. appeared first on TIME.
