A grift? From Trump? How could we possibly have gotten here?
Nearly 600,000 Trump supporters paid £74 ($100) each towards a gold smartphone that, nearly a year on, does not exist.
The Trump Mobile T1 phone was announced in June 2025 by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump as a patriotic alternative to Apple and Samsung, retailing at £370 ($499) and promising a ‘Made in the USA’ build.
An estimated 590,000 buyers paid a £74 ($100) deposit to secure one, collectively handing the venture roughly £43.7 million ($59 million). As of May 2026, not a single confirmed customer has received the device. Now, a fresh wave of anger is spreading across MAGA forums after buyers received communication making clear that their money is, for all practical purposes, gone.
American population: about 400 million. Cost of the war in Iran: about 20 billion per day. 20 billion divided by 400 million: about 50 dollars a day.
Every single person in America spent the equivalent of this Trump phone in ten days of this war that has lasted more than six times as long. How the man is still America’s President, I don’t know. But the saga of the $500 cult vaporphone sure explains a lot.
Being in a panopticon prison state has a way of dissuading people from doing the needful.
Obviously there’s more nuance than that, but…
Maybe to get an idea of what’s going on, look at the timeline at https://maps.deflock.org/timeline
I don’t have the spoons for more explanations right now, but we know how badly we’re getting fleeced.
It’s bad, but also… it’s extremely complicated. China has a surveillance state. The EU, UK, and US are all flirting with surveillance state technology. You have companies like Palantir, Pegasus, Flock, … promoting their products to governments like magic hat solutions to issues such as terrorism. You have data aggregation companies selling private data to the 3 letter agencies. You have cops willingly using these networks because it makes their job slightly more effortless. You have Trump And Co with their own motives, who would love to find any possible leverage over their perceived enemies. You have AI companies riding the bull of the US economy, all desperately looking for catchy use cases. You have this idea of an AI arms race.
Whatever world we walk into, it’s not looking pretty. It’s looking like we might actually develop something which is going to be damn near impossible to turn off.