GoKawiilWhere’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. This week, I’m investigating where it might have been built — and why it definitely wasn’t the US.
Almost a year after its announcement, the Trump phone has “launched.” A few journalists and YouTubers have received early samples of the phone, though there’s still little evidence that any regular buyers have gotten theirs. If and when anyone else gets it, they’ll discover an open secret: Just like Trump’s “God Bless the USA” bible, it’s not really made in the USA.
When Trump Mobile announced its phone in June 2025, there were a lot of red flags. It had a weird name: the “T1 Phone 8002 (gold version).” The spec sheet was incomprehensible, including a “5,000mAh long life camera.” (What?) There were multiple release dates, all of which it missed. And then there was the real whopper: The phone was supposedly “designed and built in the United States.”
The claim didn’t last long. Less than two weeks after the announcement, the Trump Mobile website was updated. All (well, almost all) the “made in the USA” claims were scrubbed. Now the Trump phone is “proudly American” and has “American hands behind every device,” whatever that means.
Trump Mobile’s website now says the phone is “shaped by American innovation.” Screenshot: Trump Mobile website
We have the Federal Trade Commission to thank. The FTC regulates marketing claims that a product is made in the USA, and the rules are stringent: “all significant processing” of the product must take place in the US, and “all or virtually all” components must be made in the US. With the overwhelming majority of phone components manufactured in China, India, and southeast Asia, that’s a problem.
Trump Mobile knows the rules. “There are certain things that you have to do in order to say ‘made in America,’” Don Hendrickson told me when I spoke to him and fellow executive Eric Thomas in February, claiming that they’d only ever said it was a “goal” to be made in America. When I pointed out that the company had explicitly claimed the phone was “made in the USA,” Thomas only admitted that “there might have been something put on the website.”
“If we’re going to build everything in America,” Thomas added, “it is going to cost more money.”
The company has largely stuck to its more careful phrasing since. When it announced last month that the phone would soon ship, CEO Pat O’Brien said only that the T1 is “proudly assembled in the US.” I was told by Thomas and Hendrickson that the phone goes through “final assembly” in Miami, though he wouldn’t say exactly what that meant. “It’s definitely more than slapping a cover on the phone,” Thomas said, estimating that the phones would arrive in Miami in “let’s say 10 parts.” Claims to be “assembled in the US” are also regulated by the FTC, but the bar is lower and less clear: Products must go through “principal assembly” in the US, and that assembly must be “substantial,” though the specifics are ill-defined. A “simple screwdriver assembly” isn’t enough to count, but that still leaves room for interpretation.
“You’re being asked to build some of the hardest things in the world to build, with the most precision that you can imagine, at peanuts.”
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