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

Nicely, people. Right here we’re once more. Within the seemingly unending ladder to nowhere that’s the Trump phone saga, there’s yet one more 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 an excellent bigger alleged preorder determine that means almost 600,000 alleged folks have allegedly spent cash on this dubious-at-best machine.

That’d be a harrowing piece of information, however as you could have guessed from the quantity of dramatic “allegeds” I put within the prior sentence, there’s actually no strategy to affirm 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 a number of 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 at the very least as previous as social media.

The very fact is, we nonetheless don’t have any actual, respected knowledge on how many individuals, if any, have truly spent cash on the T1, identical to we have now 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 ways” 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 have now 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 actual fact, not anticipate any in any respect.