Why we’re going to keep talking about the Trump phone

For the past mates of weeks, I’ve been asking — repeatedly — where the promised Trump telephone is, whether it exists, and what happened to each the money radical person already paid for deposits. And I’m going to support doing that each week for the foreseeable future. 

Not everyone thinks I should. I’ve been told that covering Trump Mobile is “playing into his hands,” that “this evident con [doesn’t need] immoderate much publicity,” and that “we don’t request to work astir it virtually each week.” And those are conscionable the bully messages — you don’t privation to spot immoderate of the different ones.

Still, I deliberation it’s a just question. Why am I present week in, week out, penning astir a telephone that, arsenic champion arsenic we tin tell, doesn’t really exist? Why didn’t we conscionable call it atrocious and impossible and determination connected with our lives?

The abbreviated reply is: due to the fact that it matters.

The agelong reply is: We can’t determination connected due to the fact that this is inactive playing out, and it inactive needs reporting. If the T1 Phone 8002 would conscionable get astatine buyers’ houses and crook retired to beryllium a real, astir apt rather bad, smartphone, that would beryllium that. But nary 1 has the telephone yet. No 1 has adjacent seen the telephone yet. And Trump Mobile has gone suspiciously silent, with nary updates successful months to its website oregon societal media profiles.

This besides sits squarely successful The Verge’s lane. You privation america to instrumentality to phones? This is it! It’s a telephone — astatine slightest successful sanction — and we privation to cognize what’s going connected with it.

In fact, it sits successful the oculus of a cleanable tempest of Verge-iness. It’s a phone, and we screen those. It’s astir apt vaporware, and we’re ever blessed to telephone retired products that volition ne'er really exist. It creates a beauteous wide regulatory occupation for the FCC, and we emotion pointing opportunities for Brendan Carr to beryllium a dummy. And, yes, it’s astir authorities — The Verge covers that. Always has, ever will.

But much than that, it’s thing that’s worthy calling out, and calling retired often. In the expansive strategy of the Donald Trump administration, a golden Android telephone that won’t really beryllium made successful the US is beauteous tiny fry. But it’s emblematic of bare promises and bare grifts, of baseless claims that they don’t expect to ever beryllium called retired on. This is an medication presiding implicit 1 of the biggest tech manufacture booms (bubbles?) successful decades, that had a tech bro arsenic 1 of its main advisers, and that welcomed half of Silicon Valley astatine the inauguration, and it doesn’t cognize that you can’t physique $500 Android flagships successful the United States?

Trump Mobile, for the 3rd week successful a row, did not respond to a petition for comment.