The Trumps are doing phones now. This week, the Trump Organization announced its own cellphone service called Trump Mobile, as well as a gold-colored smartphone called the T1, which will purportedly be manufactured in the United States and retail for $499. It is available for preorder now and will supposedly ship in August or September, though one reporter who attempted to buy the device was left feeling unsure: His card was charged $64.70 instead of the full $100 down payment, and he was never asked to provide a shipping address.
What other details do you need? “Trump Mobile is going to revolutionize kind of, you know, cellphones,” Eric Trump, the president’s son and an executive for the Trump Organization, said on Fox Business. According to Trump Mobile’s Terms of Use page, its service will be “powered by” Liberty Mobile, which itself runs on T-Mobile and uses the clever tagline “Let Freedom Ring.” Other marketing materials confuse the issue by suggesting that Trump Mobile works with all three major carriers. The phone plan will cost $47.45 a month, which is somewhat expensive for this type of service but makes sense numerologically with Trump’s brand (47th and 45th president).
To be clear, Trump is not building out his own networking infrastructure. Trump Mobile will be a mobile virtual network operator (or MVNO). These essentially buy service from major providers such as T-Mobile and AT&T at a discounted, wholesale rate, and then sell that service to customers who are comfortable with making various compromises in exchange for a much lower bill than they’d have with the mainstream carriers. This is about the extent of the available details. The Trump Organization did not return my request for additional information about where the phone would be made and by whom, nor did it answer my question about whether the phone currently exists physically. (The images on the website appear to be not photographs, but questionable mock-ups—the camera is depicted without a flash, as noted by The Verge.) I also asked the Trump Organization whether the Trump family faces a conflict of interest in entering an industry that is regulated by the Federal Communications Commission, an agency led by presidential appointees; no response.
But I was most interested in my unanswered question about why the Trump Organization would want to be involved in the telecom industry at all. To some extent, the answer is obvious: The Trumps are involved in such a sprawling array of moneymaking endeavors, it would make more sense to ask whether there are any they would not consider trying. They’ve done quite a bit in the tech sector already, between NFTs, memecoins, a social-media platform, and other fascinating ventures.
Still, the choice is curious, if only because operating a cellphone service seems so boring and unglamorous. It’s also funny timing: Last week, the actors Jason Bateman, Will Arnett, and Sean Hayes, who co-host the super-popular podcast SmartLess, announced SmartLess Mobile, a discount phone plan that also relies on T-Mobile. That move was not well explained by its participants, either. In an interview with People about the move, Bateman said twice that most people listen to podcasts on phones, and therefore the telecom industry is a logical one for podcasters to enter. “It just kind of organically shaped into something that really made sense for us to try,” he added.
Did it?
The celeb phone companies remind me, a little, of the ISP that David Bowie launched in 1998, which for $19.95 a month offered “full uncensored” internet access, Bowie-themed chat rooms, and a coveted “@davidbowie.com” email address. That service lasted for eight years, which is pretty impressive, but it was more of a highly laborious artistic experiment and act of fan service than an effort to maintain and profit from digital infrastructure long term.
Today’s businesspeople appear to be more directly inspired by the actor Ryan Reynolds’s fortuitous investment in Mint Mobile, another MVNO, which sold for more than $1 billion in 2023. What they’re doing is a step further than what he did, because they’re not just investing in an existing phone company: The Trump Organization and the SmartLess guys are putting their names on something new. The question, then, is: Why would phone companies suddenly appeal to the type of people who might otherwise put their names on bottles of tequila or pickleball paddles or what have you?
I emailed Steffen Oefner, a vice president at Magenta Telekom, the Austrian iteration of T-Mobile (MVNOs are more common in Europe), to ask him. “Interessent point,” he replied. “One answer is … because they can.” The MVNO industry now has a number of middleman companies that will do the work of negotiating with a network and then allow brands or influencers to simply put their name on a ready-made product, he explained. Setting up an MVNO is significantly cheaper than it was 10 years ago. “We do expect more celebrity brands or fan-base MNVOs to appear in the mobile market,” he said. To add to my list, he gave the example of LariCel, a phone company in Brazil affiliated with the actor Larissa Manoela (who has more than 53 million followers on Instagram), which refers to its customers as LariLovers.
After reviewing the list of personalities who appeared at a recent MVNO conference held in Vienna, I found James Gray of Graystone Strategy, which consults with clients in the MVNO space. He agreed with Oefner about the ease of starting an MVNO and also pointed to the invention of digital SIM cards, or eSIMS, which enable people to switch to a new phone plan instantly, without having to wait for a little piece of plastic to be shipped to them. “Now we’re in a digital world,” he said.
This general point had multiple implications. Previously, he said, companies such as T-Mobile would have preferred to partner with retail companies or banks, enticing new customers by offering them special deals on products or services they were already using. Today, a digital brand such as that of “an influencer or someone running a podcast” can also sell a service, maybe by saying that it represents their values or that it comes with access to a community. “Trump would be a relatively famous brand,” he noted. As another example, he pointed to FC Barcelona, which recently started offering an MVNO called Barça Mobile to its many, many super-enthusiastic fans as a way to be even more intensely involved with the club (while also receiving cheap phone service).
The SmartLess guys are pitching their new venture by saying that a lot of people currently pay for more cellphone data than they actually use, given that they are actually connected to Wi-Fi most of the time (suggesting, I suppose, a customer base that is often either at home or in an office). The Trump plan will offer roadside assistance and access to a telehealth service (suggesting, I suppose, a customer base that is older or generally accident-prone). In the U.S., other politics-themed MVNOs also already exist—the California-based Credo Mobile puts some of its profits into left-wing causes, while the Texas-based Patriot Mobile puts some of its profits into right-wing causes. (The latter identified itself as a trailblazer of “the Red Economy” in a press release congratulating Trump Mobile on its launch.)
Gray concluded that the appeal of the phone business to the celebrities was obvious. “The difference between this and, say, a celebrity vodka is this is recurring revenue,” he told me. “People sign up and they pay a subscription to you every month.” (That was also the case with Rihanna’s underwear membership, though people did eventually get upset about it.) And of course, he’s right—that is the big difference. That is why a famous person would want to run a phone company. We’re in a digital world now. How lucky.
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