Trump's 'golden phone' scandal is an ongoing massive mess

President Donald Trump’s family has pitched a $500 phone to their supporters, arguing that the ostensibly Made in America product would be extremely high quality.

“The long-delayed golden Trump Mobile phone looks nothing like the advertised image, has a smaller screen than promised, and its color leaves a lot to be desired, according to one of the few people to lay eyes on a real one,” reported The Daily Beast's Cameron Adams on Tuesday. He added that “the $500 Trump phone has now been delivered to tech media for review, one year after it was announced and nine months after its hard launch to cash-rich MAGA diehards.”

Patrick Holland, the managing editor of the tech site CNET, told CNN that the phone does not appear to be made in America as promised. The packaging instead claims the phone is “designed with American values in mind.” Furthermore, instead of looking like the sophisticated gold phone promised in the original image, Holland says the Trump phone looks like “an altered iPhone 16 Pro.”

Holland added that, visually, “sometimes it looks like those gold coins that Scrooge McDuck would jump into for DuckTales. Other times, it’s got a mustard vibe to it, and yet other times, it kind of looks like a urine sample.”

Holland even speculated that the Trump team tried to get around manufacturing the phone outside the country (he speculated Taiwan because the processor and graphics card perform similar to the HTC U24 Pro 5G, which is made there) by being hyper-literal. The box, after all, says “Made in the USA.”

“They could be being literal here, and it could be that they put the phone in the box and that the box was assembled in the USA,” Holland pointed out. Regardless of the phone’s quality, though, he criticized the Trump team for delaying sending people their phones.

“If you did order this phone, it doesn‘t matter what your political persuasion is, you shouldn‘t be ripped off,” Holland said.

“A separate NBC review last week found that the phone was also being sold with a major blunder emblazoned on it,” The Daily Beast added. “The American flag printed on the back of the phone appears to contain only 11 stripes instead of the standard 13.”

Problems with the Trump phone, which are Trump’s latest attempt to monetize the presidency, have been evident since last year. The Guardian's Joanna Partridge reported in December that the phone's release would be delayed, saying there is a “strong possibility” the handset would not be delivered as promised that month, blaming the government shutdown for the issue. Described even then as “proudly American,” Partridge wrote that it was to be “etched with an American flag. The T1 was initially promised in August — and the website still states it will be released 'later this year.' Customers are required to pay a $100 payment to pre-order the device. The T1 launch came shortly after Trump criticized Apple over its plans to move the production of iPhones destined for the U.S. market from China to India."

Partridge added, though, that considering the "low levels of domestic smartphone production in the U.S.," it "remains unclear who could manufacture the T1 handset."