Today, Explained - The Trump phone grift

Episode Date: June 23, 2026

President Trump's ongoing efforts to become a mobile mogul and to run a bank suggest Trump grift is alive and well. This episode was produced by Dustin DeSoto, edited by Amina Al-Sadi and Jolie Myers, fact-checked by Gabriel Dunatov, engineered by David Tatasciore and Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Trump Mobile offers both a cellular plan and a smartphone that will provide the same coverage as the three nationwide phone service carriers. Photo illustration by Joe Raedle/Getty Images. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. New Vox members get $20 off their membership right now. Transcript at ⁠vox.com/today-explained-podcast.⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today explained from Vox, Sean Ramos for I'm here in Washington, D.C., where all the attention is on the reflecting pool. Back in May, it was going to be indestructible. If you had a knife, I don't want to give anybody ideas. If you had a knife, you can't even cut it. Yesterday, it's been vandalized. Who would think that somebody would go into a pool and take a knife and start cutting it? People are big mad because it sure looks a lot like the president of the United States

gave a buddy of his and another company like $15 million or so. of our taxpayer money to completely bungle a renovation of our national mall just weeks before our nation's 250th birthday. What a waste, what a scam. We're going to get to that one later in the week, but on the show today, we're going to talk about two Trumpy scams that are directly enriching the Trump family, all while Daddy Trump is running the country,

the Trump phone, which maybe you've heard about, and a Trump bank, which maybe you haven't. Support for this show comes from Fed, pet insurance. Do you have a pet? Every six seconds, a pet owner in the U.S. gets hit with a vet bill of over $1,000. And it's almost always an unwelcome surprise. That's where Fetch pet insurance comes in. Fetch is the most complete pet insurance. Get paid back up to 90% of vet bills. You can use any vet in the U.S. and Canada. All vets are in network. Go to fetchpet.com slash save right now for your free quote. That's fetchpet.com slash save.

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Meet the model at C-E-L-O-N-I-S.com slash context. Lisa, what happened? Greg waited until 9 o'clock last night to get started. That's when my three minutes kick in. You are fired, you minute-horting clock watcher. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Boom.

I'm Don Preston, news editor at The Verge. And you recently wrote about a telephone? I did, a very specific telephone. the T1 Phone 8-002 brackets gold version, to be specific. What a name. What a name, aka the Trump Phone, which is what everyone's been calling it, just because it's a bit less of a mouthful. We're here to talk about the one, the only, maybe even the infamous Trump phone.

Gold casing, a flag stamped on the back. This long-awaited T-1 phone from Trump Mobile is finally here. But yes, it was just the one-year anniversary of the announcement of Trump Mobile. and the Trump phone, the Made in America phone, that wasn't really made in America, one year later, has still kind of only halfway launched. Do you have one? I do not. I have one on the way.

It has been, we have paid for one. The verge has bought a phone, we've put down money, it is somewhere in transit at the moment. How much does a Trump phone cost? 499 bucks. Oh. But to get that, you've got to put down a hundred dollar deposit. So we paid $100 a year ago and have been waiting very patiently ever since to see if we would get anything in exchange for that hundred bucks.

It looks like maybe we actually will. Donald Trump, President of the United States, I believe user of the iPhone. Yeah. Why phone? Very unclear, in all honesty. I think the bigger angle from the Trump organization perspective, they just like licensed the name to this company that's running all this stuff. stuff, really they seem to be building it all around the network. There's Trump Mobile, which has this plan called the 47 plan, which costs you 47, 45 a month.

45th president of the United States. 45th and 47. Very carefully chosen numbers. Wow. And I think that's really what it's about. That's the way of making money. I chat out to a couple of executives from the company back in February this year, and they kind of said, we're in the razor blade business, not the razor business, by which they clearly meant the money is made in the monthly subscription service. The money is made in the plan.

Here's what you get. Unlimited talk, text and data. Free calls to over 100 countries, including places like U.S. military bases. You will see the telecom tax being added to the cost of the plan. And this is really high. This is higher than the taxes and fees added

by AT&T, T-Mobile, or Verizon. The phone, when I spoke to these executives, they kept trying to downplay the phone. The phone was this marketing idea they'd have. The phone was this thing that would drum up interest in the plan. And then suddenly All anyone wanted to talk about was the phone. I think I might be the first person to have the T1 Trump phone.

Guys, you will not believe what I have in my hand. This is actually the Trump phone, the T1. It's actually real. So weird, but tell us about this phone. I mean, how does it compare to some of the most popular phones on the market? It's a very generic mid-range Android phone. It's golden. It's kind of golden.

It's a bit of a yellowy gold in person from everything I've heard. They could have to get the gold right? The phrase P-colored has been thrown around. Oh, no. This anodized aluminum is just straight up not gold. It's not even really yellow. It's like orange-y. It's ugly.

It's not real gold. Look at this cheap piece of . This is the phone, circa like, what? 2018. It's goldenish. It's got an American flag on the back. On the back, we've got the American flag with not enough stripes. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 stripes.

This is the T1 phone. It's made for Americans. So they kind of got the American flag wrong. I think, in a way, one of the funny things about it is it's not a bad phone from the specs. The specs aren't... They're pretty decent. The screen looks nice. It's 120 hertz panel.

It's got a pretty respectable Qualcomm chipset inside. It's got 512 gigabytes of storage and 12 gigabytes of RAM, which is certainly in the current economy is actually getting kind of unusual. So bits of the spec sheet look pretty good for $499 bucks. The problem is there's just so much a good phone these days

is actually about the software and the support and the stuff around the pure hardware that's inside and that's where we look at this and just think Trump Mobile is definitely going to be lacking. I mean, just the obvious thing is long-term support. They've made absolutely no commitment to how long they're going to keep giving people software updates for the phone.

And when they asked executives about that, they just seem kind of confused by the question, which isn't a great sign when you've got companies like Google and Samsung promising you'll get updates for seven years. This can be your phone for a long time. Okay, so it's a decent phone hardware-wise. It looks like it's going to be a problematic phone software-wise. Who is it for? Is it just for people who wear MAGA hats? Presumably, that's a big part of the base for this. I can't imagine they're really trying to draw in anyone who's particularly technically minded. I think one of the telling things from what we've seen,

there's been a couple people who've gotten the phone and kind of managed to unbox it and see what's inside, is it actually comes with a printed user manual, which includes instructions like how to make a phone call, which it's been a long time since Apple sent out a phone with instructions on how to make a phone call. And I think that probably speaks a little bit to the audience they think they have here, which is people who are as far from technically minded

as you can get and really do not have a decent understanding of what they're buying here. Do we know how many such people have this thing so far? Not entirely. There were rumours for a long time that there'd been 600,000 pre-orders of the phone, but I couldn't find a shred of evidence so that was true. I mean, that would be a huge number for a company like this and would represent a lot of money coming in, even just from the $100 deposit. It looks more likely that it's somewhere in the 20 to 30,000 range. They had a website leak. It turned out they weren't really securing order

data properly. So some people managed to get in and pull out what appeared to be a complete database, of every order that had been placed. And that had 27,000-and-something entries in it. So that was as of about a month ago. So that looks like there might be the cap of how many of these they've sold. But it's hard to be certain, and the company hasn't confirmed or denied either way. And what do we know about the production process? You mentioned with some skepticism that one of the promises of this phone would be that it

would be made in the United States, where of course, not many cell phones are made. What's the truth of that claim? So it doesn't look like it's made in the U.S. at all. And in fact, even Trump Mobile admits that. Oh. Trump Mobile has had to make changes for its upcoming smartphone. Earlier this week, made in the USA was taken off the Trump Mobile website. Well, now they're scrapping that tagline.

It sounds like they just realized that the phone cannot be manufactured in the U.S. of A for that price tag of $499. They said it was made in the USA when they first took. announced the phone, and they walked that back less than two weeks later. It took, I think, 12 days for them to say, oh, no, okay. And they just very quietly went into the website, took away every mention of made in the US, and replaced it with these very vague, suggestive phrases, like... American hands behind every device.

Or... Designed with American values in mind. This is like... like iterations of the classic Apple, the iconic designed in Cupertino, right? Yes. Very careful in that. They do now say it is assembled in the US. I've been told that happens in Miami. We don't know exactly what that means. I mean, made in the US is protected terminology. The FTC has very strict regulations on what counts has made in the US. And the hard bit of it is basically every component has to be US made. And for a phone, that's borderline impossible.

There is one company called Purism that manages it, and their phone costs two grand. The FTC does also regulate assembled in the US. There are some criteria there. They're a bit broader. They're a bit looser. So hopefully, it is honestly meeting those assembled in the US criteria. It means it's got to be more than a simple screwdriver assembly, is the phrasing. So in theory, they can't just be getting a couple bits and slapping the cover on the phone

and shipping it out. They have to be getting it in sort of a smaller number of pieces and making a substantial transformation. but we don't know exactly what's going on there. We're not sure where it is made, but we have some pretty good guesses. It looks uncannily like a phone called the HTCU24 Pro, and now that some people have managed to get the phone and tear it open, we know that it looks uncannily like that phone inside and out. It has pretty much the same body, almost all the same parts.

The battery is different. That's basically it, which seems to really strongly suggest they are basically the same device. And that HTC phone is made in China. So we don't know where the Trump phone is made, but the phone it seems to be a carbon copy of is made in China. It sounds a little bit like a grift. Is it a grift, Dom? I have gone back and forth on this question every day for the past 12 months.

I've been reporting about this thing, kind of week in, week out for seven or eight months now, and constantly going back and forth on whether this is a scam, a grift, whatever. But the general place I've settled on is that it's a bit of a rip-off. They're definitely overcharging for what they're selling. But it's that combined with a lot of naivety about how realistic and simple it is to put together a phone and sell it. They announced this thing would be made in the USA and would ship within two or three months of them announcing it, which anyone could just tell was nonsense.

The moment they said this, everyone on the newsroom was like, well, that's not happening. So what is going to happen? Let's try and figure that out. Because it's not what they just said. And yeah, that's my general feeling. There's a sort of incompetence and naivety mixed with a little bit of a desire to just make a quick buck. Read Dom at theverge.com.

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You can get started today at vanta.com slash explained. That's VANTA.com slash explained. You follow drugs. You get drug addicts and drug dealers. But you start to follow the money. And you get... Today, excephemy. He explained.

Zach Everson is a research director at something called the Trump Accountability Project at a group called Public Citizen. He and another guy try to keep track of all the president's many side hustle. Zach mostly follows the money. And lately, that's meant following the Trump family's efforts to basically get into banking. Yeah. What we're seeing here is making what happened in the first term look ethical. So there are essentially three steps here. First in September 2024, shortly before the election, Trump's and the Whitkoffs launched World Liberty Financial.

Trump announced World Liberty Financial in a live stream on X saying, quote, crypto is one of those things we have to do. World Liberty Financial, the new crypto platform in which President Donald Trump and his affiliates hold a 60% stake, announced a strategic token reserve designed to bolster Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies. Second, they came out with two products for World Liberty Financial. a stable coin and a crypto token. Just think about a digital currency like Bitcoin, World Liberty Financial, this digital token,

kind of like that, but it's part of this broader cryptocurrency venture that the Trump family launched really just weeks before the election. President Trump's World Liberty Financial is jumping into the stable coin game. They just introduced USD1, a digital asset whose value will be pegged to the US dollar and backed by short-term U.S. government treasuries,

dollar deposits and other cash equivalents. And now what they need is the banking authority so that they can cut down on the fees that they'd have to pay outside sources, they can increase the fees that they make, and they can also centralize all regulation under the federal government. So USD1, it is a stable coin, which is crypto. It means it is backed one to one by reserves. So think of it as a bank loan. only going the opposite way.

You are giving money to World Liberty Financial. You're giving U.S. dollars, and they are giving you this virtual currency. And the whole time that they're sitting on your U.S. dollars, they are investing it in treasuries, and they are keeping the interest. So this made news. It would have been spring of 2025

when it was announced that an investment firm backed by the national security advisor of the UAE, had purchased $2 billion of these magic beans using U.S. dollars and was investing in finance. So it essentially creates its own currency here. And you've got, it went from nothing to all of a sudden being one of the most popular stable coins out there by way of the UAE National Security Advisor directing this money towards him. Nearly half of the Trump family crypto company World Liberty Financial was purchased for $500 million by Sheikh Tanin. bin Zayed al-Nayan, who heads the United Arab Emirates State Investment Fund and serves as

national security advisor, sometimes referred to as the spy shake. There's been some direct conflicts, especially with a big deal that came through the United Arab Emirates. They decided to use a Trump cryptocurrency to pay for a $2 billion investment. So that put them really on the map there, and that's a lot of what this banking trust license would have to do. It would allow, would allow them to do. Right now, if they, the reserves have to be held someplace else. They can't hold their own reserves. Similarly, they can't issue their own coin in the United States. It has to be done elsewhere. If this trust

gets approved, which we believe it's going to be soon, that would allow them to essentially collect more fees in direct transactions and take out some middlemen in transactions they already have going on. And Binance is, of course, I think the most popular crypto exchange. It is. It is. And Binance is not allowed to operate in the United States. So when we say 80 to 85% of USD1 is held at Binance, if the law is being followed, that means that 80 to 85% of Donald Trump's stable coins is in the hands of people overseas,

which is a huge problem for the United States president to be so beholden. If all those foreigners just started dumping, that would really crash this current. he's got there cut away from the interest he can make. And that is that is a lot of financial power that foreigners have over the United States president right now. Okay. So Donald Trump has world liberty financial this, this token. He's got this stable coin. He's got business with finance. Help us understand this transition that's going on right now in the United States to help World Liberty

Financial essentially become more of a bank. Yeah. So we, it public citizens, and other groups have long been concerned about regulatory capture. You know, that's when the lobbyists or the business interests come into government and they take control of the agency that oversees their former employer. This is regulatory capture to the extreme where they are applying for a banking license from the office of the controller of the currency, and that is part of the Treasury, which is under Donald Trump's administration. So here you have World Liberty Financial is going to be regulated by an agency of the U.S. government that is under Donald Trump's control.

And someone who answers to the president of the United States will decide whether his financial firm, World Liberty Financial, gets to essentially have these banking privileges. Exactly, exactly. And another benefit of this that ties in with the administration is if this does get approved for this license, it will fall under federal regulators, not state regulators as much. So that, you know, we've seen a lot of efforts from the states for all sorts of areas combating Donald Trump in his administration that states are filing lawsuits. This puts his world liberty financial in the preview of a federal agency, which appears that it would make it a lot harder for states to try to get in there and push back on this. What are the potential conflicts of interest here? Everything.

Everything. You know, you've got an issue where we have a foreign government investing in this. Another firm backed by the UAE's National Security Advisor also owns 49% of World Liberty Financial, something the American people didn't find out about until like a year after it took place. He bought this share right before Trump was inaugurated. You know, we heard a lot in the first term about foreign emoluments.

There were all sorts of concerns about foreign governments, buying rooms and drinks at his hotel, holding banquets. An annual meeting on U.S. Turkey relations. Most years? A standard event. But not this year. Because this year, it was at the Trump International Hotel in D.C., ground zero for President Trump's conflicts of interest. NBC News has obtained receipts showing Saudi Arabia, the UAE, gutter, Turkey, China, and Malaysia spent hundreds of thousands of dollars at the Trump International Hotel in Washington. At the very same time, they were seeking to influence U.S. foreign policy in their favor.

Sometimes there were accusations that were never proven to the best of my knowledge, but that they would buy rooms and not even use them as an easy way to get money to the president. If that was the case, we're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe a low millions if that was going to be the case. Here you've got hundreds of millions of dollars going to Donald Trump and his business partners right before he became president. You know, a time where he's already announced who his cabinet's largely going to be. And according to the Wall Street Journal, it looks like the payments didn't even go through until after he was inaugurated. So if you have concerns, as the Constitution does, about the United States president accepting payments from foreign powers, this one seems to be a massive one. Kind of impossible to imagine another president doing this kind of thing, recent or, you know, especially like I can't picture Teddy Roosevelt being involved in crypto. But is there some degree to, like, Trump has this long history of grift that people just kind of look the other way at this massive grift?

I've absolutely thought so since he first came in. You know, when he first came in and had that DC hotel and the golf clubs, I thought people were like, well, it's Donald Trump. Of course, he's going to do this sort of stuff. And, you know, they pledged not to do some things. They weren't going to do any foreign deals. Don and Eric will say they abided by that promise and didn't get any credit. for it in a lot to terms on, you know, how you, what you consider a foreign deal. You know, if you think a foreign government spending a lot of money at one of his properties is a foreign

deal, then they clearly violated it. But yeah, it's Donald Trump. It's, what were you expecting? You know, I think that's the advantage that Donald Trump has long had is that people have known him for decades. And he's always been like this. So, so what are you expecting? And that's, you know, massively problematic. No other president, to the best of my knowledge, has applied for a banking charter before. And, you know, you're seeing it a lot. You know, there was Hunter Biden, Hunter Biden, Hunter Biden. And, you know, what Hunter Biden did was wrong. You know, it was wrong in the same way of like Roger Clinton and Billy Carter. And there's a long history of family members of presidents running some kind of grift. But that is such low dollars. According to Forbes,

Eric Trump's net worth is shot up from $40 million before his dad was elected to $4,000. 400 million. Donald Trump Jr. went from 50 to 300 million. Barron Trump, college student, he's doing all right. He's worth about 150 million, all according to Forbes. These are massive amounts of money. You know, we would talk about how Don Jr. and Eric, while certainly wealthy, were not nearly as wealthy as the children of a lot of other billionaires who were involved in family business. Well, they fixed that. And a lot of that has come through World Liberty Financial. Those two are both listed as co-founders. They're both promoting it.

And Barron as well is listed as a co-founder of the company. And that is largely what is driving this massive amount of wealth that you're seeing the Trump's accumulate this term. You can follow Zach's following of the Trump money at citizen.org. Dustin DeSoto produced today. Amina Al-Sadi and Jolie Myers edited. David Tadishore and Patrick Boyd mixed. Gabriel Dunitab did the maths for today explained.

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