Where’s the Trump phone? We’re going to keep talking about it every week. We’ve reached out, as usual, to ask about the Trump phone’s whereabouts. This week, I’m investigating where it might have been built — and why it definitely wasn’t the US.
Almost a year after its announcement, the Trump phone has “launched.” A few journalists and YouTubers have received early samples of the phone, though there’s still little evidence that any regular buyers have gotten theirs. If and when anyone else gets it, they’ll discover an open secret: Just like Trump’s “God Bless the USA” bible, it’s not really made in the USA.
When Trump Mobile announced its phone in June 2025, there were a lot of red flags. It had a weird name: the “T1 Phone 8002 (gold version).” The spec sheet was incomprehensible, including a “5,000mAh long life camera.” (What?) There were multiple release dates, all of which it missed. And then there was the real whopper: The phone was supposedly “designed and built in the United States.”
The claim didn’t last long. Less than two weeks after the announcement, the Trump Mobile website was updated. All (well, almost all) the “made in the USA” claims were scrubbed. Now the Trump phone is “proudly American” and has “American hands behind every device,” whatever that means.
We have the Federal Trade Commission to thank. The FTC regulates marketing claims that a product is made in the USA, and the rules are stringent: “all significant processing” of the product must take place in the US, and “all or virtually all” components must be made in the US. With the overwhelming majority of phone components manufactured in China, India, and southeast Asia, that’s a problem.
Trump Mobile knows the rules. “There are certain things that you have to do in order to say ‘made in America,’” Don Hendrickson told me when I spoke to him and fellow executive Eric Thomas in February, claiming that they’d only ever said it was a “goal” to be made in America. When I pointed out that the company had explicitly claimed the phone was “made in the USA,” Thomas only admitted that “there might have been something put on the website.”
“If we’re going to build everything in America,” Thomas added, “it is going to cost more money.”
The company has largely stuck to its more careful phrasing since. When it announced last month that the phone would soon ship, CEO Pat O’Brien said only that the T1 is “proudly assembled in the US.” I was told by Thomas and Hendrickson that the phone goes through “final assembly” in Miami, though he wouldn’t say exactly what that meant. “It’s definitely more than slapping a cover on the phone,” Thomas said, estimating that the phones would arrive in Miami in “let’s say 10 parts.” Claims to be “assembled in the US” are also regulated by the FTC, but the bar is lower and less clear: Products must go through “principal assembly” in the US, and that assembly must be “substantial,” though the specifics are ill-defined. A “simple screwdriver assembly” isn’t enough to count, but that still leaves room for interpretation.
“You’re being asked to build some of the hardest things in the world to build, with the most precision that you can imagine, at peanuts.”
But if making phones in the US is the goal, why isn’t Trump Mobile doing it already? On this, everyone I speak to agrees: The US simply doesn’t have the infrastructure to build phones, in terms of equipment, engineering expertise, and the affordable labor required for manufacturing at scale. “Just the sheer volume of people that it takes is tremendous,” I’m told by Keith Cochran, who worked on the manufacturing of some iPhones while at Jabil, one of Apple’s suppliers. It’s a low-margin business, which doesn’t leave much room for manufacturers to absorb higher labor costs from US employees. “You’re being asked to build some of the hardest things in the world to build, with the most precision that you can imagine, at peanuts,” Cochran says.
Even if you solve the labor problem, right now there simply aren’t the facilities or the equipment in the US to build phones from scratch. That’s a stumbling block that even Hendrickson admits Trump Mobile ran into. “Some of the manufacturing equipment that’s required for the phone doesn’t exist in the US,” he told me in February. “No one has purchased it and brought it here.” There are US companies making components like touchscreens and batteries, Thomas adds, but mostly for bulky manufacturing equipment — “they don’t go down to the scale and the quality of a phone.” We’re still a long way from production shifting for flagship-quality chipsets, OLED displays, batteries, modems, camera sensors, and the myriad other complex components inside a modern phone.
There’s at least one company that seems to have managed making a phone in the US, but it costs $1,999. For the price of an iPhone 17 Pro Max with 2TB of storage, Purism’s Liberty Phone offers 4GB of RAM, a single 13–megapixel rear camera, and a 720p LCD screen. Patriotism can’t make a great phone, but it can run up a huge tab. You can see why Trump Mobile went in a different direction.
Trump Mobile won’t disclose where its $499 phone is made. The closest Hendrickson and Thomas would get was to say the phone and its components are sourced from “favored” or “friendly” nations, and that the goal was “to remove as much of this from China as possible.”
It’s not clear the company reached that goal. Based on its spec sheet and design, it looks increasingly likely that the T1 Phone is a tweaked version of 2024’s HTC U24 Pro. A few months ago HTC told me that the company “does not design or manufacture phones for third parties,” but that doesn’t rule out the possibility that the U24 Pro itself was made by a third party — after all, HTC sold the bulk of its smartphone business to Google in 2017, and its phone manufacturing capability has been limited ever since.
HTC declined to comment on where the U24 Pro was manufactured, or who by. But while HTC itself is Taiwanese, some U24 Pro boxes have a “Made in China” label, and Taiwan’s National Communications Commission certification database lists Guangdong Yuanchang Electronics Co., Ltd. as the phone’s manufacturer — based, unsurprisingly, in Guangdong, China. If the HTC U24 Pro was made in China, and the T1 Phone is an adapted version of the U24 Pro, then, well… it makes you start to wonder if China counts as a “friendly nation” after all.
If you believe Trump Mobile — though at this point, I’m not sure why you would — there’s still hope for things to change. As recently as last month, CEO O’Brien said it aims to “become the first to release a phone with the majority of parts being built here in America” (let’s just set aside that Purism got there first, shall we?). Hendrickson and Thomas told me something similar, suggesting that a future version of the T1 could be “fully assembled” in the US, while a higher spec T1 Ultra might be wholly US-made.
The pair pitch Trump Mobile as a driving force pushing other manufacturers to bring production lines to the United States, including for battery, display, and camera components. They claimed to have US manufacturing partners ready to make components “within a year,” even including Qualcomm, which they told me is “willing to do a chip run in the Phoenix facility” for Trump Mobile. I’ve reached out to Qualcomm for comment.
“None of this stuff happens in a year or two.”
Making a phone in the US to a reasonable price point might be possible one day. Trump Mobile’s “stepping stone process” might even be the right approach, according to Cochran. “I would start with just box build, which is the assembly of the phone, then you could add the [printed circuit board assembly] in and gradually start going through the food chain,” he tells me. It’s Trump Mobile’s timeline that doesn’t sound realistic.
“The progression is a decade,” he explains, with the end goal being a phone designed “from day one” to be built in a fully automated factory — the easiest way around the higher cost of labor. He claims that recent AI developments have “accelerated how fast you can program a factory of robots,” though cautions that building them is another question entirely.
Supply chain analyst Kevin O’Marah suggests the same 10-year timescale, agreeing that you’d have to “redesign the phone completely” to get there. He’s blunt about the prospects of anyone, Trump Mobile or otherwise, achieving the feat within a year: “None of this stuff happens in a year or two,” he says. “That’s impossible.”
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