Eric Trump and Don Jr. Learned the Phone Grift From Their Dad’s Licensing Deals

A Florida shell company took the $100 deposits. The Trumps got an undisclosed licensing fee. Same play as Trump Toronto, Trump Panama, Trump SoHo.

Ready for some more receipts?

Eric Trump and Don Jr. didn’t invent the gold phone grift, they learned it watching their dad license the Trump name onto buildings he didn’t finance, didn’t build, and in some cases didn’t even step foot inside.

A Florida shell company called T1 Mobile LLC took $100 deposits - a viral post claimed 590,000 of them, but nobody’s shown proof - for a phone that was supposed to ship in August 2025 and now has no release date at all.

And I have to wonder - are there really 590,000 people who want a gold-plated Trump phone? Or is this just another way to funnel money to the family?

Hmmmmm…anyway.

T1 Mobile is registered in Palm Beach Gardens. The registered agent is a local attorney named Stuart Kaplan. The actual owners and members of T1 Mobile LLC haven’t been publicly disclosed.

The Trump Organization licensed the family name to that LLC and the licensing fee has not been disclosed either - Reuters and Al Jazeera both flagged that omission at launch and it still hasn’t been answered.

For comparison, Trump’s most recent financial disclosure showed about $8 million total in licensing income across every Trump-branded product combined in 2024. Watches, sneakers, Bibles, fragrances, the Greenwood Bible, the 45 guitar, all of it. The Trump World Seoul tower paid the family $5 million as a one-time fee. So the Trump Mobile fee is somewhere in that ballpark - a few million to maybe tens of millions, depending on how the deal’s structured. Nobody outside the deal actually knows.

But the licensing structure is the whole story, and anyone who read the Russian Receipts series should already see exactly where the boys learned this.

Trump Toronto, Trump Vancouver, Trump Panama, Trump Baku, Trump Istanbul, Trump Manila, Trump Mumbai, Trump SoHo - those were licensing deals. Other developers raised the money, hired the contractors, navigated the local permitting, took on the debt, and absorbed the risk. The Trumps got paid a fee for the name on the front of the building. When the buildings underperformed or the projects collapsed, the developers ate it. When the brand became politically toxic, Toronto’s owners bought out Trump’s contract, Panama’s majority owner forced his company out, and Vancouver’s hotel dropped the name after it went bankrupt. The Trumps had already cashed the check.

CREW counted twenty-four Trump-branded development projects underway in eleven countries during this second term, most of them structured the same way. License the name. Take the fee. Let someone else build the thing.

That’s the model the boys grew up watching. Of course, they ran it on a phone.

The phone story tracks exactly with the licensing model. T1 Mobile LLC takes consumer deposits. The Trumps take a licensing fee. The LLC absorbs whatever happens when all those people start asking where their phones are.

The “Made in the USA” thing fell apart inside a week - the banner got swapped for “American-Proud Design,” then “shaped by American innovation.” By February the executives admitted bulk manufacturing happens overseas. The first version was reportedly a reskinned Wingtech Revvl 7 Pro 5G, a Chinese-made phone. The newest one looks almost exactly like HTC’s two-year-old U24 Pro, with maybe ten components bolted on in Miami.

The phone itself kept changing. First mockup looked like a gold iPhone 16. Then somebody Photoshopped a Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, slapped a flag on the back, and forgot to crop out the Spigen case logo. Spigen, the case company, threatened to sue. Then the design got redone again into a copper-dipped Android 15 thing.

Same name, same hundred-dollar deposit, completely different phone.

The recent terms of service updates make it worse. The deposit doesn’t guarantee a phone gets made. It doesn’t lock in the price either. Back in February, executives said people who’d already put down a deposit would still pay $499 and later buyers would pay “less than $1,000” - but the terms now say the price could change before release. You agreed to all of that when you put your hundred down.

The thing I genuinely cannot wrap my head around is how the brand still works as a sales tool. The Trump name has been a punchline for collapsed ventures since the eighties.

Trump steaks, Trump vodka, Trump magazine, Trump airlines, Trump mortgage, the Atlantic City casinos, Trump University which settled for $25 million in fraud claims in 2016, the Trump-branded hotels in Toronto, Vancouver, and Panama, which all ended up dropping his name. The licensing model has always insulated the family from the wreckage. Other people lose money. The Trumps get paid no matter what.

Elizabeth Warren and ten other lawmakers wrote the FTC in January asking the agency to investigate. They asked, in plain English, whether collecting $100 deposits and missing every promised ship date is a deceptive practice. Whether claiming a phone is made in the USA when it isn’t is false advertising.

The FTC they wrote to is the FTC Trump brought under direct White House control by executive order last year. He fired the Democratic commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter for being “inconsistent” with his priorities.

The agency that would decide whether T1 Mobile LLC broke the law answers to the president whose family business licensed it the name.

There’s a viral video out this week of a guy who pre-ordered four phones, four hundred dollars in, crying on camera and begging other Trump supporters not to do what he did.

He kept calling Trump Mobile. They kept telling him the phone was coming.

A hundred dollars from who knows how many people sits in a Florida LLC whose owners haven’t been made public, with a name on it that has been costing people money since the Reagan administration.

SOURCES:
Sen. Warren: Lawmakers Question FTC on Trump Mobile’s Questionable Marketing Practices
Sen. Warren: Updated Letter to FTC on Trump Mobile Delays (PDF)
IBTimes: Trump Mobile T1 Phone Controversy
IBTimes: Trump Gold Phone Delays Frustrate Buyers
NBC News: Democratic Lawmakers Urge FTC to Investigate Trump Phone
Fierce Network: Trump Mobile’s Made in America Phone Still MIA
The Register: FTC and Trump Mobile
Al Jazeera: Trump Organization Announces Smartphone Targeting Conservative Consumers
NPR: Trump Wealth, Business, Crypto, Brand
CREW: Trump Foreign Development Tracker (as of March 2026)
Wikipedia: Trump Mobile
Wikipedia: The Trump Organization

Correction, September 27th, 2026: This essay first said T1 Mobile took about $59 million in deposits from 590,000 people - that number traces back to one viral, anonymous post, and nobody has shown proof of it. It also said the building owners in Toronto, Vancouver and Panama all paid to get the Trump name off - Toronto’s owners bought out Trump’s contract, Panama’s majority owner forced his company out, and Vancouver dropped the name after its hotel went bankrupt. It said the phone is a reskinned Chinese-made Wingtech Revvl - that was the first version, and the newer design looks almost exactly like an HTC U24 Pro. And it said executives now put the price at less than $1,000 instead of $499 - they said people who’d already put down a deposit would still pay $499, and later buyers would pay less than $1,000.

Update, September 27th, 2026: A few lines now say the FTC answers to the president under an order Trump signed in February 2025, that no FTC investigation had been confirmed, and that nothing shows the deposits sit in escrow - and since this ran, an IT worker who found a leak in Trump Mobile’s website told The Register on May 22nd, 2026 that it exposed data on more than 27,000 people who had ordered, nowhere near 590,000, while the phones started reaching customers about two weeks after this post.