Trump Phone: (Not) Made in America
Not Now, Not Ever. No Matter What They Tell You
It’s an iPhone lookalike, but all-(fake) gold, which comes as no surprise to anyone who knows anything about Trumpian style standards. The Trump Mobile phone, recently announced by Donald’s sons has a model that sells for $499, or a base model for less, but without the gilded trim or Trump branding if you want to live like the commoners.
The new venture is making waves because the sons claim that “eventually all the phones can be built in the United States of America.” You should focus on that one rhetorically vital word - can. Sure, anything’s possible. I mean, eventually I can climb Kilimanjaro, but I don’t have that on my schedule, and they don’t have the phone manufacturing on theirs, either. That is an important thing to know, folks.
Everyone who knows anything about manufacturing, software, tech hardware, and well…the Trumps, is cynical about the veracity of whether Trump Mobile will follow through on any notion that they will manufacture a smartphone in the US by August, which is the shipping date for customers who currently have preorders for the first of the devices. This point is key, since Trump has of course threatened pretty hefty tariffs on tech companies in Asia, where most cell phones are made. President Trump owns the Trump Organization, the parent company, but his sons run things while he is in office, so he (the president) hasn’t commented on any details about where the phones are currently being manufactured.
The thing is, most of the MAGA faithful who have preordered these phones surely do not realize where they are being produced and assembled. The company press release is misleading. It clearly states that the phones are “designed and built” in the United States, and the website boasts that the phones are “MADE IN THE USA” while the marketing shouts about the “47 Plan” and a US-based call center. While the website mentions a “full lineup” of devices in the store, it does appear that there is really just one model of differing finishes, they may introduce more after they sell off the remaining stock of Trump Steaks, but we’ll have to see how much room is in the Trump freezer.
Most analysts agree that the phones will assuredly be manufactured in China, just like all other Trump merch. Chinese manufacturer Xiaomi is one that has nearly matching hardware easily available and can reproduce the shell of the T1 quickly and cheaply. Additionally, there are no US manufacturing sites outfitted to spin up the features and functionality that the phone requires. A Daily Beast article notes that Tinglong Dai, who teaches operations management and business analytics right here in my hometown of Baltimore at Johns Hopkins University says that it would take roughly five whole years for the kind of infrastructure required to get a factory up and running that it takes to build a phone like Trump phone.
The screen, the memory, the battery, the camera, all of those components - that takes the kind of manufacturing that we just don’t have here. We would need to build the facility, or retrofit a place, we would need to train or upskill a whole workforce, we would need to plan and zone, and make ready a facility on the scale of some of the larger outfits we’ve got like Amazon’s warehouses only with highly skilled workers, designers, and with lots of other elements like this one in South Korea:
See all the water cooling for chill casting? See the hydraulics? The plastics repurposing? The compression extrusion? Resin pellets? All of the polishing machines? The anodizing compound machinery? The carton sealing and barcoding technology? The warehousing and shipping areas? Did you catch the bit about the shipping production and resource management? The adhesives production?
Yeah… if those phones are going to legit be “Made in the USA,” all of that has to be done here. But Donny and Eric are delulu, and so is anyone who thinks they are honest. We know they aren’t.
When they say, “Built for America by Americans,” they mean “Scammed by Trump once again, but you weren’t paying attention.”
Trump Made in the USA video on Twitter
Be kind, friends.