The Trump Telephone Is Nonetheless (Checks Notes) a Deflating Vortex of BS

Properly, of us. Right here we’re once more. Within the seemingly unending ladder to nowhere that’s the Trump phone saga, there may be another dubiously crafted rung alongside the best way—and this one has a quantity connected! Yay for numbers; they deserve a downgrade in dignity, too.

The aforementioned quantity in query has to do with preorders of the T1, Trump Cellular’s alleged gold-colored cellphone that has nonetheless not shipped regardless of being eligible for a $100 deposit since June. As famous by The Verge, the alleged cellphone now has a good bigger alleged preorder determine that implies almost 600,000 alleged individuals have allegedly spent cash on this dubious-at-best system.

That’d be a harrowing piece of information, however as you’ll have guessed from the quantity of dramatic “allegeds” I put within the prior sentence, there may be actually no strategy to verify the veracity of that quantity or the place it got here from. It seems the official cellphone of “faux information” acolytes may very well be the topic of a faux determine. Who’d have thunk it?

As The Verge notes in its personal rabbit gap dive into the determine, the perfect guess on its origin is… a social media put up—particularly a Facebook post from December. That put up, as posts usually do, has since been amplified just a few instances over by X’s Grok AI and even by the press office for Gavin Newsom, the Governor of California. A narrative as previous as time—or not less than as previous as social media.

The very fact is, we nonetheless haven’t any actual, respected information on how many individuals, if any, have truly spent cash on the T1, similar to we’ve no actual, tangible proof of the cellphone’s existence. The timing of this unverifiable determine certain is one thing, although. Simply this week, Democratic lawmakers have urged the FTC to look into the “bait-and-switch techniques” of Trump Cellular, particularly round its now-reneged promise of creating the T1 cellphone within the U.S. In case you missed it, an American-made cellphone of the T1’s description is actually, like… not even possible.

So, right here we’re, swimming in much more potential bulls**t surrounding a tool that additionally reeks equally of the stuff. As if pivoting to promoting refurbished iPhones and Samsung Galaxies wasn’t sufficient, now we’ve to wade by way of probably made-up preorder figures. I’d like off this trip, please.

As for the FTC inquiry into the Trump cellphone, I’m pretty sure that we are able to relaxation assured that it’s going to go nowhere. If there’s one factor I’ve come to study requirements over this carnie-operated rollercoaster of a decade, it’s that I ought to, in reality, not anticipate any in any respect.