Why we’re going to keep talking about the Trump phone

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been asking — repeatedly — where the promised Trump phone is, whether it exists, and what happened to all the money people have already paid for deposits. And I’m going to keep doing that every week for the foreseeable future. 

Not everyone thinks I should. I’ve been told that covering Trump Mobile is “playing into his hands,” that “this obvious con [doesn’t need] any more publicity,” and that “we don’t need to read about it literally every week.” And those are just the nice messages — you don’t want to see some of the other ones.

Still, I think it’s a fair question. Why am I here week in, week out, writing about a phone that, as best as we can tell, doesn’t actually exist? Why didn’t we just call it bad and impossible and move on with our lives?

The short answer is: because it matters.

The long answer is: We can’t move on because this is still playing out, and it still needs reporting. If the T1 Phone 8002 would just arrive at buyers’ houses and turn out to be a real, probably quite bad, smartphone, that would be that. But no one has the phone yet. No one has even seen the phone yet. And Trump Mobile has gone suspiciously silent, with no updates in months to its website or social media profiles.

This also sits squarely in The Verge’s lane. You want us to stick to phones? This is it! It’s a phone — at least in name — and we want to know what’s going on with it.

In fact, it sits in the eye of a perfect storm of Verge-iness. It’s a phone, and we cover those. It’s probably vaporware, and we’re always happy to call out products that will never actually exist. It creates a pretty clear regulatory problem for the FCC, and we love pointing opportunities for Brendan Carr to be a dummy. And, yes, it’s about politics — The Verge covers that. Always has, always will.

But more than that, it’s something that’s worth calling out, and calling out often. In the grand scheme of the Donald Trump administration, a gold Android phone that won’t actually be made in the US is pretty small fry. But it’s emblematic of empty promises and naked grifts, of baseless claims that they don’t expect to ever be called out on. This is an administration presiding over one of the biggest tech industry booms (bubbles?) in decades, that had a tech bro as one of its chief advisers, and that welcomed half of Silicon Valley at the inauguration, and it doesn’t know that you can’t build $500 Android flagships in the United States?

Trump Mobile, for the third week in a row, did not respond to a request for comment.