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MAGAs Are Fuming After Email Confirms They Will Never Get Their $500 Trump Phones or Deposits Back
(www.ibtimes.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 09 May 2026
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Well, there over 200 million adult US citizens, assume 1/3 are trump supporters that's 60 million potential customers, it's not unrealistic for 1% of them to have placed a $100 deposit on a trump branded phone.
I'm just more surprised they decided to not ship anything. They could've simply gone to any ODM ordered a generic design but in gold color and called it a day. Heck they could run an actual MVMO sell some overpriced android phones as carrier branded devices, sell some overprice cell service, then sell the brand off to wash their hands of it and probably would've made far more than the paltry $6 million that they did make in pre-order deposits
Edit: I was off by a zero they made ~$60 million in deposits
I mean they could have jumped on Alibaba, had a customized firmware, had the "gold" color, had a logo or something screen printed on the outside, and probably spent less than $100/phone, at least if current listings are correct. Sell the things for like $299 and they clear $200 profit on each with nearly no effort.
That's exactly who an ODM is, and Original Design Manufacturer. In the mobile space it's generally some tech giant like Foxconn which makes tons of devices for tons of brands, and they generally have their own generic designs that they'll happily white label for any brand
Alot of these sellers on Alibaba aren't nearly up to what an ODM is. They're sorta more like middlemen that do stuff like take generic phones from ODMs and customize them or just grab parts off the local market and slap them together. To work with somebody like Foxconn, you'd better have some significant volumes - they just won't talk to you otherwise. Now, maybe Trump is an exception there, but they're still not going to want to do business unless there's decent volume in it for them. The volumes I've seen for this phone is the sort of thing that wouldn't even register for them. They'd only even think about it as a way to buy favor.