Once on the phone with an agent, I was quick to learn that this new side hustle was at least refreshingly free of Donald Trump’s signature bombast. There was no braggadocio; no outrageous claims being made about the phone’s capabilities. Instead, I was treated to that other signature Trumpian quality: the unreadiness for prime time that those of us who lived through the Covid pandemic knew all too well. But this time, it also comes with the stink of self-dealing, if not outright corruption.
The agent I spoke with wasn’t prepared to do a side-by-side comparison between the iPhone and Trump’s wares. (Strange because they were in many ways comparable—at least on paper.) She could tell me nothing about cloud storage. She knew the screen dimensions and the weight of the phone but could only add that “it looks like it had the standard thickness.” The Verge’s David Pierce (who calls the phone “bad and impossible”) reported that there was no processor listed on the website for the phone, and I was unable to get any clarification on this matter beyond the assurance that this was going to be an Android phone. Gen Z can rejoice, however, because Trump is bringing back headphone jacks.
My experience with Trump Mobile seems pretty typical—though I wasn’t willing to actually put my credit card at risk for journalism, sorry. The Washington Post’s Shira Ovide said that while Trump Mobile successfully charged her for joining Trump’s wireless service, it charged her more than the listed price and she hasn’t been able to use it yet. 404 Media’s Joseph Cox attempted to make a $100 down payment on the Trump phone itself (due to hit the market in September), only to be billed $64.70 and sent a cryptic confirmation email. “It is the worst experience I’ve ever faced buying a consumer electronic product and I have no idea whether or how I’ll receive the phone,” he wrote.
If Trump has a magic power, it’s that no matter how much evidence you marshal in the service of letting the buyer beware, the president still manages to get fools to part with their money pretty regularly. Whether it’s for Trump steaks or the Trump presidency, the one constant is the multitudes willing to be his marks. Frankly, even Trump’s self-conception borders on the level of delusion necessary to con oneself. His own recollections of dealmaking derring-do, when probed, tend to reveal a disastrous self-pantsing.
“I think the smart game they are probably playing is to put a crypto wallet on the phone that leverages WLF, $Trump, and their stable coins,” Cuban posted in response to the product launch. WLF is a reference to crypto firm World Liberty Financial, which is connected with the Trumps.
Cuban may be onto something. Crypto has become the new, transcendent dimension of Trump’s scam empire. This week, Eric Trump announced that the family is planning to start “American Bitcoin,” a “company focused on Bitcoin mining, the business of running energy-guzzling machines to generate new coins.” Alongside Trump’s interest in WLF and his emoluments clause–busting memecoins, the president is now tightly entangled in what The New York Times refers to as a “business portfolio … fraught with conflicts of interest that have blurred the boundary between government and industry.”
Perhaps the most distressing thing about this is the extent to which Democrats are helping to further Trump’s ends. This week, 18 Senate Democrats helped pass the “GENIUS Act,” which is essentially the crypto industry’s version of Gramm-Leach-Bliley. As University of California-Berkeley economist Barry Eichengreen describes at length, the GENIUS Act would bring widespread mayhem in the way it would grant “hundreds—perhaps even thousands—of American companies” the power to issue their own bespoke cryptocurrencies. “Imagine Walmart issuing a Walmartcoin, and Amazon doing the same with an Amazoncoin, enabling them to bypass the banking system and credit card networks,” he writes.
Trump might be the nation’s biggest problem right now, but the crypto industry ranks high on the list. As The New Republic’s Paige Oamek reported last September, Washington has lately been flooded with crypto cash: “Crypto companies spent over $121 million to sway elections during [the 2024 election] cycle,” she wrote. “By comparison, since the Citizens United ruling in 2010, the fossil fuel industry has collectively spent $176 million over 14 years of election cycles.”
This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.
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