Donald Trump's much-hyped 'American-proud' T1 smartphone, unveiled in New York and sold for $499 to hundreds of thousands of supporters, is in reality a rebadged Taiwanese handset built in China, according to a forensic teardown by repair specialists iFixit.
The gold-finished Trump Mobile T1 was launched by Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump in June 2025 as the flagship of a new MAGA-flavoured mobile network, pitched as a patriotic alternative to mainstream tech brands. The company originally trumpeted that its phones would be made entirely in the United States, only to quietly delete that promise when industry analysts pointed out that the US has no facilities capable of producing a modern smartphone from the ground up.
