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

Nicely, of us. Right here we’re once more. Within the seemingly unending ladder to nowhere that’s the Trump phone saga, there may be another dubiously crafted rung alongside the way in which—and this one has a quantity hooked up! Yay for numbers; they deserve a downgrade in dignity, too.

The aforementioned quantity in query has to do with preorders of the T1, Trump Cell’s alleged gold-colored telephone that has nonetheless not shipped regardless of being eligible for a $100 deposit since June. As famous by The Verge, the alleged telephone now has a fair bigger alleged preorder determine that implies practically 600,000 alleged folks have allegedly spent cash on this dubious-at-best system.

That’d be a harrowing piece of information, however as you will have guessed from the quantity of dramatic “allegeds” I put within the prior sentence, there may be actually no approach to verify the veracity of that quantity or the place it got here from. It seems the official telephone 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 publish—particularly a Facebook post from December. That publish, as posts usually do, has since been amplified a couple of occasions 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 not less than 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, similar to now we have no actual, tangible proof of the telephone’s existence. The timing of this unverifiable determine positive is one thing, although. Simply this week, Democratic lawmakers have urged the FTC to look into the “bait-and-switch ways” of Trump Cell, particularly round its now-reneged promise of creating the T1 telephone within the U.S. In case you missed it, an American-made telephone 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 now we have to wade by way of doubtlessly made-up preorder figures. I’d like off this journey, please.

As for the FTC inquiry into the Trump telephone, I’m pretty sure that we are able to relaxation assured that it’ll 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 reality, not count on any in any respect.