The Trump Phone Is Literally a Gilded Cage for a Two-Year-Old Smartphone

President Donald Trump has gilded the White House interiors in mountains of fake, tacky gold. Trump’s family, in similar fashion, plastered gold-colored aluminum onto an old foreign-made phone, the long-awaited Trump Mobile T1, and is trying to push it as yet another idol of excess to Trump’s sycophants in the states.

According to the repair gurus at iFixit, the long-promised Trump Mobile T1 is an HTC U24 Pro in practically everything but name, down to the mainboard and cameras. The only real cosmetic difference between both devices is the Trump phone has remodeled speaker grills and an expanded camera bump. iFixit further says that the design shows every indication the T1, or at least its disparate parts, were made in the same factory as HTC’s 2024 flagship.

The T1 was a mess from the beginning, when the Trump family backed the Trump Mobile venture in June 2025. From the outset, Trump Mobile showed off renders of what appeared to be a recolored Samsung Galaxy phone before switching gears and offering a completely different device. The company claims the T1 is “assembled” in the U.S., but it certainly isn’t born from any materials sourced from American soil.

A friend let me hold the Trump Phone that his publication purchased (and actually received)

Can confirm it’s 💩💩💩

Looks cheap. Feels cheap. Everything about it is garbage pic.twitter.com/b6HuFP9kS4

— Ray Wong (@raywongy) June 8, 2026

It would be something if the phone at least felt expensive. Gizmodo’s own senior editor of consumer tech, Raymond Wong, went hands-on with the Trump T1 this past week. He called it “so tacky” and “such a cheap-feeling phone.” While iFixit said the phone has an aluminum frame, Wong said it felt more like plastic (as did the rear panel).

The T1 is not exactly an underpowered device if you accept that it’s two-year-old hardware. It’s powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 chip, 12GB of RAM, and 512GB of SSD storage. The one difference is that Trump Mobile sourced its memory from Micron compared to HTC, which went with SK Hynix. The T1 also has a larger, Philippine-made 19.35Wh battery compared to HTC’s China-made 17.23Wh. Here’s the rub: it’s not actually a better battery. iFixit reported the T1’s battery only supports 30W charging, while the U24 Pro could handle 60W.

If you needed other reasons to not get the Trump phone other than all the obvious warning signs, last month the company leaked a trove of customer data. Trump Mobile blamed a third-party platform that it had contracted with, without offering more details on how or why it had posted the names and emails of T1 buyers to the open web.

The Trump Mobile T1 is a joke, but a joke made to fool a very specific class of would-be phone buyers. Trump Mobile made (or, better to say, copied) the T1 for customers who think that the U.S. flag has 11 stripes, not 13. It was made for people who think they need Truth Social pre-installed on their phone. It’s made for people who imagine they would love a gilded cage for their smartphone, even when it’s just a cheap hunk of cheap aluminum surrounding a two-year-old device.