Why isn’t Trump’s phone made in the USA?

Where is Trump’s phone? We will continue to talk about it every week. We reached out as usual to ask about the whereabouts of Trump’s phone. This week I’m investigating where it may have been built, and why it definitely wasn’t in the United States.

Nearly a year after it was announced, the Trump phone was launched. a little Journalists and YouTubers We received early samples of the phone, although it’s still out there Little evidence That any regular buyers have received their purchases. If anyone else gets it, they’ll discover an open secret: just like Trump’s “God Bless the United States of America” ​​Bible.it’s not really made in the USA.

When Trump Mobile It announced its phone in June 2025There were a lot of red flags. It had a strange name: “T1 Phone 8002 (Gold Edition).” The spec sheet was incomprehensible, including “5,000 mAh long-life camera.” (What?) There were multiple release dates, and she missed all of them. Then there was the real surprise: the phone was supposedly “designed and manufactured in the USA.”

The claim did not last long. Less than two weeks after the announcement The Trump Mobile website has been updated. All (ok Almost all) “Made in the USA” claims have been eliminated. Now Trump’s phone is “proudly American” and “American hands behind every device,” whatever that means.

We have the Federal Trade Commission to thank. the Regulated by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The marketing claims the product is made in the USA, and the rules are strict: “all significant processing” of the product must occur in the United States, and “all or nearly all of the ingredients” must be manufactured in the United States. with The overwhelming majority Of phone components manufactured in China, India and Southeast Asia, this is a problem.

Trump Mobile knows the rules. Don Hendrickson told me when I was I spoke with him and fellow executive Eric Thomas In February, they allegedly only said it was a “goal” that should be achieved in America. When I pointed out that the company explicitly claimed the phone was “Made in the USA,” Thomas only admitted that “there might have been something put on the website.”

“If we wanted to build everything in America, it would cost us more money,” Thomas added.

The company has largely stuck to its more precise formulation ever since. when Announced last month That the phone will be shipping soon, CEO Pat O’Brien said only that the T1 was “proudly assembled in the United States.” Thomas and Hendrickson told me that the phone is going through “final assembly” in Miami, though they didn’t say exactly what that means. “It’s definitely more than just putting a case on the phone,” Thomas said, estimating that the phones will arrive in Miami in “say, 10 parts.” The FTC also regulates “assembly in the US” claims, but the standard is less and less clear: products must go through “major assembly” in the US, and that assembly must be “substantial,” though the details are not well defined. A “simple screwdriver set” is not enough to account for, but that still leaves room for interpretation.

But if making phones in the US is the goal, why isn’t Trump Mobile already doing that? So everyone I talk to agrees that the United States simply does not have the infrastructure needed to build phones, in terms of the equipment, engineering expertise, and affordable labor needed for large-scale manufacturing. “The sheer number of people it takes is enormous,” Keith Cochran, who worked on manufacturing some iPhones while working at Jabil, an Apple supplier, told me. It’s a low-margin business, leaving little room for manufacturers to absorb higher labor costs from American employees. “You’re being asked to build some of the hardest things in the world, with as much precision as you can imagine, for the price of peanuts,” Cochran says.

Even if you solve the labor problem, at present there simply are not the facilities or equipment in the United States to build phones from scratch. This is a stumbling block that even Hendrickson admits Trump Mobile encountered. “Some of the manufacturing equipment required for the phone does not exist in the United States,” he told me in February. “No one bought it and brought it here.” Thomas adds that there are American companies that make components such as touch screens and batteries, but mostly for large manufacturing equipment – “not proportional to the size and quality of the phone.” We’re still a long way from transforming the production of high-quality chips, OLED displays, batteries, modems, camera sensors, and the countless other complex components inside a modern phone.

It seems like at least one company has managed to make a phone in the US, but it’s priced at $1,999. To know the price of the iPhone 17 Pro Max with a storage capacity of 2 TB, Purism phone It offers 4GB of RAM, a single 13MP rear camera, and a 720p LCD display. Patriotic can’t make a great phone, but it is He can Run a huge tab. You can see why Trump Mobile went in a different direction.

Trump Mobile won’t reveal where its $499 phone is manufactured. The closest Hendrickson and Thomas could get was to say that the phone and its components were sourced from “favored” or “friendly” countries, and that the goal was to “remove as much of this from China as possible.”

It is not clear that the company has reached this goal. Based on the spec sheet and design, it looks increasingly likely that the T1 is a rebadged version of the 2024 HTC U24 Pro. A few months ago HTC told me The company “does not design or manufacture phones for third parties,” but this does not rule out the possibility that the U24 Pro phone is itself It’s manufactured by a third party – after all, HTC It sold the bulk of its smartphone business to Google in 2017, and its ability to manufacture phones has been limited since then.

HTC declined to comment on where the U24 Pro was manufactured or who manufactured it. But even though HTC itself is Taiwanese, some U24 Pro boxes are “Made in China” label.and Taiwan National Communications Commission certification database Guangdong Yuanchang Electronics Co., Ltd. As a phone manufacturer – based, unsurprisingly, in Guangdong, China. If the HTC U24 Pro is made in China, and the T1 is a rebadged version of the U24 Pro, well… it makes you start to wonder if China is considered a “friendly country” after all.

If you believe Trump Mobile – although I’m not sure why you do at this point – there’s still hope that things will change. Last month, CEO O’Brien said he aims to “become the first to launch a phone with most parts made here in America” ​​(let’s put aside the fact that Purism got there first, right?). Hendrickson and Thomas told me something similar, suggesting that a future version of the T1 could be “entirely assembled” in the US, while the higher-spec T1 Ultra It may be entirely American made.

The duo touts Trump Mobile as a driving force pushing other manufacturers to bring production lines to the United States, including battery, display and camera components. They claimed to have US manufacturing partners willing to manufacture components “within a year,” including Qualcomm, which they told me was “willing to do chip runs at the Phoenix facility” for Trump Mobile. We have reached out to Qualcomm for comment.

It may one day be possible to make a phone in the United States at a reasonable price. Trump Mobile’s “launching process” may be the right approach, according to Cochran. “I’ll start by just building the box, which is the phone assembly, and then you can add (the printed circuit board assembly) and gradually start going through the food chain,” he told me. It’s the Trump Mobile timeline that doesn’t seem realistic.

“Progress takes a decade,” he explains, and the ultimate goal is to design a phone “from day one” to be built in a fully automated factory – the easiest way to overcome high labor costs. He claims that recent advances in artificial intelligence have “accelerated how quickly a factory can program robots,” though he cautions that building these robots is another question entirely.

Supply chain analyst Kevin O’Mara suggests the same 10-year timeline, and agrees you’ll have to “completely redesign the phone” to get there. He’s frank about the odds that anyone, Trump Mobile or otherwise, will achieve this feat within a year: “None of these things happen in a year or two,” he says. “It’s impossible.”

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