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I’ve Got a Bridge to Cell You, by Andrew Egger
Last year, you may recall, Donald Trump’s sons decided to try to break into the right-wing mobile phone market. At their June announcement event, Donald Trump Jr. pitched their new offering, Trump Mobile, as a cellular service for the forgotten MAGA man: “We’ve been working for a long time trying to deliver for the American people, doing something unique for people who had been underserved,” he said. “We’ve partnered with some of the greatest people in the industry to make sure that real Americans can get true value from their mobile carriers.”
Nearly a year on, though, the whole thing is starting to look like—stop us if you’ve heard this one—a scam. Customers who wanted to sign up were encouraged to plunk down a $100 “deposit” to preorder the group’s bespoke, made-in-America, Trump-branded $499 smartphone, the T1, which was supposedly right around the corner. In June, the company was promising to ship phones by August. According to International Business Times, more than half a million people ponied up, pouring an estimated $59 million into Trump Mobile’s coffers.
But no phones have arrived, the “made in America” promises have vanished, the launch date keeps sliding back, and this week, Moneywise.com reported on a quiet change made last month to the company’s terms of service:
A preorder deposit provides only a conditional opportunity if Trump Mobile later elects, in its sole discretion, to offer the Device for sale. A deposit is not a purchase, does not constitute acceptance of an order, does not create a contract for sale, does not transfer ownership or title interest, does not allocate or reserve specific inventory, and does not guarantee that a Device will be produced or made available for purchase.
That’s right, MAGA Patriot! You might have thought, when you sent the president’s sons your hard-earned $100, that you were preordering a phone that they’d soon be sending you—since that’s how preorders work and what they led you to believe. But that’s just because you don’t know business. In reality, what you were ordering was just a conditional opportunity to buy a Trump phone later, should they ever get around to making them, which to be clear they are in no way promising that they’ll ever do.
Reading about this swindle, I found myself wondering why it rankled me so much. After all, this is hardly the first time Trump and his family have cashed in on his cult of personality to part his superfans from their cash. Indeed, for many MAGA superfans, being endlessly shaken down for cash via a blizzard of unbelievably sleazy campaign-solicitation texts and emails has become a defining feature of their digital lives. And that’s to say nothing of Trump’s crypto projects, Trump’s NFTs, Trump’s guitars, Trump’s sneakers, Trump’s watches—I could go on.
Maybe some of it is that ludicrous forgotten-man shtick. It’s such a classic huckster move, the same one on which Trump’s entire political project is built. In reality, the mobile market is a hypercompetitive one, with many companies jonesing for consumers’ business and fighting to offer the best value to get it. But Trump Mobile isn’t actually trying to compete in that market. It’s trying to trick people into opting out of it because they love the president and like hearing a bunch of stuff from him about how they’re “real Americans.”
Maybe it’s the ludicrousness of his gang continuing to run these two-bit scams at all. Scalping $100 a head from hundreds of thousands of people who are enthused by Trump Mobile’s pitch that “Trump will proudly be displayed in the status bar as your network” isn’t bad money if you can get it, but it’s chump change compared to the bigger self-dealing projects Trump is running these days. At least when Arab sheikhs and oil barons choose to pour billions into the Trump family’s pockets, they’re doing it with their eyes wide open: It’s simple corruption to buy more favorable presidential treatment for their nations, and no one can deny they’ve been getting what they paid for. These Trump Mobile saps, by contrast, just want a new phone—and they’re not even getting that.
Or maybe it just strikes me as so sordid because of the political landscape in which it’s unfolding. Donald Trump, who swept back into office last year with approval ratings in the 50s and an unprecedented political coalition at his back, has been hemorrhaging voters ever since. His second-term approval has never been lower—in fact, it hit another new low just today. Pretty much every voter outside his cult has already headed for the hills. And yet that stubborn 35ish percent of the electorate remains, eyes screwed shut, fingers wedged in their ears, unhappy with the state of the economy, unhappy with the state of the country, unhappy with the state of the world—but still convinced beyond all reason or persuasion that their political messiah, Donald Trump, is about to turn it all around.
This is remarkable, unprecedented political loyalty. Without it, Trump could never have gotten back to where he is today—and he’d certainly be in no position to shake down the sheikhs. And how does his family repay this loyalty? By selling his poor dumb true believers a vaporware phone.