The Trump Phone Isn’t Just a Bad Deal, It’s a Full-On Privacy Nightmare

Bad news, folks: we all went to sleep, woke up, and the Trump phone is still here. That means a couple of things. For one, it means the T1 phone wasn’t the result of a spicy, food-fueled fever dream or a bad batch of crazy-style mushrooms—it’s a real phone that costs real money, made by a real president, who thinks “fox in the henhouse” is an allegory for how to win bigly in the U.S. government. It also means something else depressing, and it’s got nothing to do with making America great and everything to do with undermining your privacy.

There are a lot of bad things about the Trump phone. There’s the gaudy, I-hate-poor-people gold aesthetic; the “long life camera” that I assume is supposed to mean “long-life battery” that is actually not long-life at all; and the fact that it’s masquerading as an American-made device, though it clearly is not being made in America and likely never will be. My personal favorite is the fact that it’s 5G enabled, which, as we all know, may not jibe well for a certain subsect of people whose conspiratorial cult (QAnon) thinks 5G caused COVID-19. But all of that could be trivial when you unpack how disastrous a Trump phone (at least in theory) could really be.

As I mentioned yesterday, after the T1’s announcement, phones aren’t just any product; they’re kind of conduits into your whole life. You do everything on your phone: banking, talking to friends and family, browsing the web, and shopping. And beyond that, you do stuff that might be of even more interest to someone who’s directly involved in politics—registering to vote, espousing or denouncing political views, and donating to campaigns. What’s to prevent, say, I don’t know, someone who works in government with direct access to that information from collecting and using that data for their own purpose? There’s a reason why the government doesn’t own the platforms we compute on, and it starts with “c” and ends in “onflict of interest.”

Some actual specs for the upcoming Trump Phone:-5000mAh long life camera (?)-under "Processor & RAM" it reads "Storage 12GB RAM", so maybe the next phone will have a processor-two of the three rear cameras are 2MP pic.twitter.com/PzPQtHGZsk

— jacksfilms (@jacksfilms) June 16, 2025

Sure, I know that our devices are already a privacy minefield to begin with, and doubly so are the platforms that we access through them, but something tells me that encoding politics directly into our devices isn’t going to skew those privacy pitfalls in a positive direction. No technology is completely agnostic at the end of the day, but that doesn’t mean we should just give up on making our hardware as safe and as neutral as possible.

I don’t want to be an alarmist here; Trump’s phone likely won’t end up being a threat to that already-tenuous digital privacy for several reasons. One is that this phone sucks, and I don’t think many people will be tempted to buy it, let alone use it every day or throw their most personal information into it. Secondly, even if this thing did sell, only the most hardcore Trump supporters would be using it, so the privacy pitfalls would only affect Trump’s voting base. Lastly, I have my doubts that this thing is even real. There’s a high chance, if I were a betting man, that Trump’s family never even gets their shit together enough to make this monstrosity a reality, especially if initial attempts to purchase it are any indication.

But despite all of that, the idea is enough for me to take a breath, pause, and ask, “Wait, what the hell is going on here?” Trump may be the first U.S. president to try and sell the American public a smartphone, but the precedents he sets have a pesky way of resetting standards for the worse. The T1 feels like exactly the kind of slippery slope that could send you and your poor brittle tailbone straight to the emergency room—sans adequate health insurance. Phones aren’t shoes; they’re not memeocins; they’re not NFT Christmas ornaments or commemorative coins—they’re people’s lives, for better and often worse. So, let’s all make the right call here and agree that we should leave our most crucial gadgets to the Tim Apples of the world.