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Where’s the Trump phone? We’re going to keep talking about it every week. We’ve reached out, as usual, to ask about the Trump phone’s whereabouts. As usual, we’re still waiting for a response. In the meantime, some impressive alleged sales figures have gone viral — but they might be too good to be true.
This week, I saw something new in my regular scouring of the web for updates on the Trump phone: a repeated claim that Trump Mobile has secured nearly 600,000 preorders for the phone. With a $100 deposit per device, that would make for a tidy $60 million payday for Trump Mobile already.
It’s curious timing, coming just before yesterday’s open letter to the FTC from Elizabeth Warren and a group of other Democrats, calling on the agency to open an investigation into the company’s alleged “false advertising and deceptive practices.” Not everyone agrees Trump Mobile deserves the Democrats’ attention, in part from the assumption that not that many people are likely to have put money down for the phone in the first place. As one commenter on my story yesterday suggested, “I can’t imagine a lot of folks were dumb enough to fall for this.” But according to these new figures, over half a million people were.
There’s just one problem: I can’t find a shred of evidence that this figure is true. In fact, it seems to trace back to a single viral, anonymous X post and is a microcosm of how the modern media landscape and AI chatbots can combine to give falsities the sheen of respectability.
I first saw the figure in, of all places, the Threads feed of California governor Gavin Newsom’s press office, which had shared a screenshot of a tweet of a Grok summary making the claim. Trustworthy, right?
The Grok post cites “reports from sources like Fortune, NPR, and The Guardian” for the 600,000 preorders, but a quick search of their recent output shows no sign of the number. I wanted to know where Grok got it from, if not there.
A quick Google search turns up an awful lot of social media posts, from accounts both big and small, but also a few stories in seemingly legitimate publications. India’s Economic Times and Hindustan Times both reported a more specific figure of 590,000 preorders, referencing an unspecified Associated Press report as the source.
The only recent AP coverage of Trump Mobile was this story from last week, summarizing the repeated delays, which makes no claim to specific preorder figures. I reached out to the organization, and its VP of corporate communications, Lauren Easton, confirmed to me that “AP’s original stories never contained such a number.”
The plot thickens. I tried the authors of the two stories citing AP, and one got back to me. Hindustan Times writer Shamik Banerjee called the citation “a typo,” and told me that the figure was in fact taken from The Times of India.
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