Where’s the Trump phone? We’re going to keep talking about it every week. Last week, we spoke to executives from the company for the first time, and this week we’re back with more details on how it began.
Trump Mobile may bear the US president’s name, but he didn’t come up with the idea, and neither did any Trump. In fact, it was the executives at MVNO Liberty Mobile that approached the Trumps with a pitch for the company, and it wasn’t their first rodeo; five years earlier, Liberty Mobile tested the same playbook with world champion boxer Canelo Álvarez.
That’s according to Don Hendrickson and Eric Thomas, the two Trump Mobile executives I spoke to last week, when they gave me a first look at what they said was a near-final version of the T1 Phone. Or, as Hendrickson repeatedly put it, when they decided to “open the kimono” to me and reveal more about the workings of the company.
Hendrickson has previously claimed to have come up with the initial idea for Trump Mobile. Talking to me last week he didn’t take full credit, but did say that the idea arose from conversations with the marketing team at Liberty Mobile — the MVNO owned by Hendrickson, Thomas, and fellow Trump Mobile executive Pat O’Brien. It was Hendrickson, however, who successfully pitched the idea to the Trump Organization.
“I got on a plane. I went down to Florida,” he told me. “I met with Eric Trump and his team and basically said, ‘Here’s what we would like to do. Here’s what we think we can do and here’s how we think we can help the American people.’”
What I didn’t realize before speaking to Hendrickson is that they’d tried this before. Only that time, it was with the boxer Canelo Álvarez. “We had a Canelo Mobile program with him and it was going out to service Mexican Americans here in the US, and we were looking at doing something along those lines,” Hendrickson said.
Canelo Mobile launched in May 2020 with familiar promises: wide-ranging cell coverage, perks like free international calling and roadside assistance (from Drive America, the same service bundled in with the Trump plan), and affordable Android phones, all bolstered by the presence of a famous name.
Unlike the Trump phone, the Canelo devices were nondescript, with no Canelo branding on the hardware itself. Image: Canelo Mobile
Canelo Mobile launched with two phones, dubbed The Legend and The Champ, and eventually added a third, The Contender. It made little effort to hide what they really were: handsets made by Hotpepper, a budget brand that has provided devices to budget MVNOs including Visible and Metro, along with the federal free phone program Lifeline. There’s not even a Canelo logo on the hardware, with Hotpepper’s distinctive chili logo in place instead. I reached out to Hotpepper for comment, but the support email on its website bounced.
Canelo Mobile did a better job of branding its accessories. It sold at least two separate pairs of over-ear headphones that bore Álvarez’s lettermark, and at various times sold different phone bundles advertising branded Bluetooth speakers, earbuds, baseball caps, keychains, and more.
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