Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
Where’s the Trump phone? We’re going to keep talking about it every week. This week, we explain how the presidential phone company connects to an older company that’s really running the show.
We’ve long known that Trump Mobile was linked to Liberty Mobile, a carrier that’s traded for years using freedom-themed branding to sell cheap mobile plans to a conservative crowd. Turns out, the two businesses are even closer to one another than it had initially appeared. And as we wait for the launch of the Trump phone — potentially as soon as next month, having been delayed from August — it’s worth understanding who’s actually behind the device, regardless of the name that will be emblazoned on its back.
“Liberty Mobile is umbilically connected to Trump [Mobile],” Don Hendrickson tells me. And he would know: Hendrickson is one of the three Trump Mobile executives, alongside Eric Thomas and Pat O’Brien, who have been the semi-public faces of the company. And the same three men just happen to be the owners of Liberty Mobile, too.
The Trump Mobile terms of use say that it is “powered by Liberty Mobile Wireless LLC,” but that appears to be underselling the relationship. During the same interview in which the executives showed me what they claim is a near-final version of the Trump phone itself, Thomas calls Liberty Mobile the “enabler” for the Trump network, while Hendrickson calls it the “backbone.” To hear Hendrickson describe it further, it’s clear that Liberty Mobile handles not only all of Trump Mobile’s technical back end and relationships with the larger carriers, but also many of its legal and financial obligations.
Here’s Eric Thomas, holding up a pre-production version of the Trump phone. Screenshot: Dominic Preston / The Verge
“Liberty Mobile is the company that is registered with all the states, that clears all the taxes, pays all of the different E911 fees, the universal service tax, the different things that each one of the states require,” Hendrickson says. “Liberty has the engineering staff, the teams that work with the carriers, the algorithms that work with giving the best possible optimization of usage to the end users.”
It seems like without Liberty Mobile, there would be no Trump Mobile. But what is Liberty Mobile?
It’s an MVNO — or mobile virtual network operator — meaning it’s a small carrier that pays a larger carrier for unused network capacity, allowing it to run a network with minimal overhead.
Most MVNOs target lower price points or niche audiences. Liberty Mobile is focused on the latter, with freedom-themed branding designed to draw in conservatives, leaning on a Liberty Bell logo in red, white, and blue.
... continue reading