Well, folks. Here we are again. In the seemingly never-ending ladder to nowhere that is the Trump phone saga, there is one more dubiously crafted rung along the way—and this one has a number attached! Yay for numbers; they deserve a downgrade in dignity, too.
The aforementioned number in question has to do with preorders of the T1, Trump Mobile’s alleged gold-colored phone that has still not shipped despite being eligible for a $100 deposit since June. As noted by The Verge, the alleged phone now has an even larger alleged preorder figure that suggests nearly 600,000 alleged people have allegedly spent money on this dubious-at-best device.
That’d be a harrowing piece of data, but as you may have guessed from the amount of dramatic “allegeds” I put in the prior sentence, there is really no way to confirm the veracity of that number or where it came from. It appears the official phone of “fake news” acolytes may actually be the subject of a fake figure. Who’d have thunk it?
As The Verge notes in its own rabbit hole dive into the figure, the best guess on its origin is… a social media post—specifically a Facebook post from December. That post, as posts often do, has since been amplified a few times over by X’s Grok AI and even by the press office for Gavin Newsom, the Governor of California. A story as old as time—or at least as old as social media.
The fact is, we still have no real, reputable data on how many people, if any, have actually spent money on the T1, just like we have no real, tangible proof of the phone’s existence. The timing of this unverifiable figure sure is something, though. Just this week, Democratic lawmakers have urged the FTC to look into the “bait-and-switch tactics” of Trump Mobile, especially around its now-reneged promise of making the T1 phone in the U.S. In case you missed it, an American-made phone of the T1’s description is actually, like… not even possible.
So, here we are, swimming in even more potential bulls**t surrounding a device that also reeks equally of the stuff. As if pivoting to selling refurbished iPhones and Samsung Galaxies wasn’t enough, now we have to wade through potentially made-up preorder figures. I’d like off this ride, please.
As for the FTC inquiry into the Trump phone, I’m fairly certain that we can rest assured that it will go nowhere. If there’s one thing I’ve come to learn about standards over this carnie-operated rollercoaster of a decade, it’s that I should, in fact, not expect any at all.
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