MAGA Is Slowly Starting to Wake Up to Truth of “Trump Phones”

MAGA fans just got screwed, again.

Hundreds of thousands of people who bought into the Trump Organization’s “T1 phone” last summer are still waiting to receive their devices, with no refunds in sight.

The Trump-branded phone was launched in June 2025, promising early adopters that they would receive the gimmicky gadget by September that year for a $100 deposit. Yet eight months later, loyalists still have nothing to show for their blind faith in the Trump family business, with no advertised release date on the Trump Mobile website.

“Hey, Trump supporter here,” one man said in a viral TikTok video. “This one goes out to Don Jr. and Eric … where the fuck’s my phone? I ordered three, no, four gold Trump phones in the summer.”

An estimated 590,000 buyers bought into the promise, supplying the Trump Organization with a cash influx of about $59 million total. But customers shouldn’t expect to get their money back anytime soon. After ordering a phone for tracking purposes, NBC News was met with various delays and excuses from the company’s customer support hotline when asking where it was. Though the company’s recently updated terms hints customers may be entitled to a refund, Popular Information reported that the hotline is unresponsive on the matter.

“600,000 people got the Trump phone. Scratch that. 600,000 people ordered the Trump phone, put $100 deposit down on it, and never got it,” posted an X user identified as MAGA Cult Slayer. “So where’s the $60 million Donnie?”

Interested buyers can still donate their hard-earned cash to the Trump family, however, as the Trump Mobile website is still accepting enrollees into their apparently nonexistent phone program.

It’s just the latest in a long string of controversies—and disappointments—surrounding the phone.

Originally, Donald Trump Jr. told podcaster Benny Johnson that the phones would be “built in the United States of America.”

“We have to bring manufacturing back here,” Don Jr. said at the time.

But within weeks of the site’s launch, all made-in-America language had been scrubbed from the product descriptions. Instead, the phone would be “designed with American values in mind,” and there would be “American hands behind every device”—strange marketing promises that could effectively mean anything.

The Verge found that the move away from American production wasn’t the only change made since the phone previewed last year: The advertised screen size of the Trump phone also dropped significantly, changing from a 6.78-inch screen to 6.25 inches, and initial advertisements listing the phone’s RAM at 12 gigabytes suddenly showed zero RAM specifications whatsoever.

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller had a Latina girlfriend in college who was “embarrassed to be seen with him.”

The Financial Times’ deep dive into Stephen and Katie Miller offered a troubling look into how the man who’s been waging a white supremacist crackdown on Latino immigrants ended up with a wife who goes on racist rants and urges women to have babies.

One passage mentions Stephen Miller’s only other publicly known relationship besides Katie, with a “light-skinned conservative Latina,” according to Jean Guerrero, author of Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda.

“He liked her a lot more than she liked him.… She was embarrassed to be seen with him, and didn’t want people to know he was her boyfriend,” Guerrero told the FT. The anonymous woman did not speak further with the publication when contacted.

While some online argued that this spurning could explain Miller’s hatred toward undocumented Latino immigrants, the FT piece noted that Miller expressed racism long before his Latina girlfriend was trying to avoid him in public.

Former classmate and friend Jason Islas told the FT that Miller called him one day in 1998, before the two started high school, and told him they weren’t friends anymore because he was Mexican. In high school, Miller’s yearbook quote came from Teddy Roosevelt: “There can be no 50-50 Americanism in this country. There is room here for only 100 per cent Americanism, only for those who are Americans and nothing else.”

“A kid being cruel to another kid is not that interesting,” Islas said. “What is interesting is that he continues down this path—clearly that’s calcified into something deeper and more powerful and menacing. He has this idea of how America should look, how power should look. It’s very Trumpy, and it’s very fascist.… It’s bound in aesthetics. He believes that the category of people who have rights, who are true Americans, look a certain way.”

Would it have been so hard to write a simple “Happy Mother’s Day” message?

Donald Trump unleashed a flood of AI-generated slop on Truth Social Sunday evening to cheer on his own flailing presidency. While Trump may have declined to publicly reference the fact that it was Mother’s Day, the president did share 10 posts from “Women for Trump.”

“I’m a Trumplican,” read one inscrutable post. 

“Trump’s the Real Deal! A True American Badass!” read another. 

Three separate posts declared Trump the greatest of all time, or “GOAT.” Another post included an AI-generated image of Trump’s face being added to Mount Rushmore. Yet another post urged the country to “BUILD THE BALLROOM.” Trump added a comment to this one: “It is going up fast!!!”

Trump shared posts from other sycophantic bots, with names such as Trump’s Army and Extremely Stable Genius. In addition to sharing posts that insisted on his own greatness, the president also shared posts bashing Democrats and former President Joe Biden. He also reposted a call to “arrest poll workers that cheated in elections.”

After boasting about receiving “Excellent Poll Numbers,” Trump shared another post claiming CNN hailed him as surpassing Ronald Reagan to become the the “most beloved president among Republicans.” It’s unclear what poll numbers he could’ve possibly been referring to, as Trump’s approval ratings have sunk to new lows. While one 2021 poll found that Trump was more highly regarded than Reagan, it’s doubtful he would be today. 

This torrent of crap didn’t come out of nowhere. Earlier Sunday, the president declared on Truth Social that Iran’s counterproposal to end the war was “TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE,” posted a screed claiming conservative members of the Supreme Court owed their loyalty to him, and shared his ongoing efforts to fix the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. He opined that Democrats “must fail” and complained about having to pay back billions in revenue after the Supreme Court struck down his illegal tariffs.  

Trump previously posted about Mother’s Day weekend, but only as an excuse to tout gains in new job numbers—after tanking job growth to practically nothing in 2025. 

Trump’s affinity for self-aggrandizing AI slop wouldn’t matter so much if he were just someone’s elderly relative posting on Facebook. But the president of the United States is clearly more interested in leading his own fan club than he is in, well, governing. 

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is once again lashing out at Democratic Senator Mark Kelly—this time for speaking freely about just how much ammunition the U.S. military has wasted in its war with Iran. 

Kelly told CBS’s Margaret Brennan Sunday that it was “shocking how deep we have gone into these magazines.”

“We’ve expended a lot of munitions,” he said. “And that means the American people are less safe. Whether it’s a conflict in the western Pacific with China or somewhere else in the world, the munitions are depleted.” 

These comments triggered Hegseth, who promptly took to X to make that known. 

“‘Captain’ Mark Kelly strikes again. Now he’s blabbing on TV (falsely & dumbly) about a *CLASSIFIED* Pentagon briefing he received,” Hegseth wrote on Sunday evening. “Did he violate his oath…again? @DeptofWar legal counsel will review.” 

While Hegseth emphasizes that Kelly’s report came from a classified congressional briefing, it’s not like the U.S. wasting munitions in this war is some big secret. In fact, Kelly even reminded Hegseth that it was something they discussed very publicly just days ago. 

“We had this conversation in a public hearing a week ago and you said it would take ‘years’ to replenish some of these stockpiles. That’s not classified, it’s a quote from you,” Kelly replied. “This war is coming at a serious cost and you and the president still haven’t explained to the American people what the goal is.”

This beef was incited months ago, when Hegseth had Kelly censured and tried to reduce his pension after he appeared in a video message  with other former servicemembers in Congress advising military personnel to refuse to follow illegal orders from the Trump administration. A federal appeals court last week appeared unlikely to allow Hegseth to punish Kelly for that basic statement, perhaps fueling the defense secretary’s current campaign against his fellow veteran. 

President Trump is desperately trying to take control of America’s elections—and he wants his own personal army to do it.

On Truth Social Sunday, Trump complained about Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer forming an elections task force led by former Attorney General Eric Holder, alleging that it would “no doubt try to suppress Republican voters, and interfere in our Elections.”

“The Democrats are totally unhinged and we will not allow them to threaten the integrity of our Elections,” Trump posted. “During my Historic Election in 2024, when I won every single Swing State, and decisively won both the Electoral and Popular votes by wide margins, the Republicans had an Election Integrity Army in every single State to preserve the sanctity of each legal vote. We will be doing the same again in 2026, but it will be much bigger and stronger. All Americans should have their voices be heard by casting a vote. Be assured this Election will be fair! President DONALD J. TRUMP.”

Trump’s words are odious, considering the actions that he and the Republican Party have taken already to interfere in the midterms and beyond. They’ve pushed for mid-decade redistricting that disenfranchises Democrats and Black Americans, they’ve continued to spread election-denial conspiracies from 2020, and they’ve installed people who support those conspiracies in local governments and election boards across the country.

Meanwhile, Americans’ faith in elections will only weaken. Rumors of ICE being deployed to the polls will grow, thanks to Republicans like Steve Bannon, frightening many people of color away from the polls. Democrats will have to come up with not only a legal strategy but a forceful one that ensures elections remain free and fair.