The question was never whether the Trump T1 was – like the failed Freedom Phone before it – a modded reskin of some cheap-ass Chinese Android model but which cheap-ass Chinese Android model it will be a modded reskin of. Tech analyst Max Weinbach believes he’s arrived at the answer: Wingtech REVVL 7 Pro 5G, previously available in the US as a T-Mobile-branded budget option, which Weinbach writes is made by Chinese company “Wingtech, now owned by Luxshare, makes it in Jiaxing, Wuxi, or Kunming China,” which Apple Insider says can be found on Amazon for $169.

This was also suggested as the likeliest answer by both ChatGPT and Claude based on the specs listed on the Trump Mobile site. Grok said it also might’ve been the Vivo Y78, which goes for as low as $180 and is also a cheap-ass Chinese model, but the only difference is $11.

In separate and entertaining pieces by the Wall Street Journal “Trump’s Smartphone Can’t Be Made in America for $499 by August” and the Verge “The Trump Mobile T1 Phone looks both bad and impossible” tech writers at both outlets laid out in pretty rich detail why there’s no chance in hell the T1 will ever be manufactured in the United States and certainly not before August, and yet a Trump Org spokeswoman wrote in an email that the phones will be built in California, Florida, and Alabama Johns Hopkins operations management and business analytics Professor Tinglong Dai said that’s bullshit. “There’s absolutely no way you could make the screen, get that memory, camera, battery, everything,” in the US without at least five years of intensive investment and planning.

Want to know what else wasn’t made in America? The stock photos on TrumpMobile.com:

This one was shot in 2020 by a Ukrainian photographer named Dmytro Zinkevych.

Nope, that’s not a Trump T1 in her hand and “Happy girl with smartphone phone looking at screen video calling” isn’t American either. She’s either Russian or Georgian as the photographer Dimaberlin aka Dmitry Marchenko lists his location as “St Petersburg / Tbilisi” in his Instagram profile.

This one? Serbia. She’s Serbian, according to iStockPhoto.

Now who knows whether or not the Trump boys are going to remove those pics from the site. They were responsive to another glaring issue, as Reuters reports the coverage map’s been taken down.

And maybe someone got fired for this fuckup too:

Lol. Reuters also provided another useful tidbit, naming “Liberty Mobile Wireless, a Florida-based company founded in 2018 by entrepreneur Matthew Lopatin,” as the actual brand behind Trump Mobile. National Zero will have to follow up and see what if any Android models they offer.