Does the Trump phone exist yet?

Last week I asked where the Trump phone was. The answer? Nowhere. There’s no update, no response, no sign of it. And since it’s still not here, I am — again — asking the same question. And I’m afraid I’m going to keep being here, week in, week out, until I have a T1 Phone in my hands. This is what I do now.

Nothing’s changed since last week. The website sits there, unchanged. There’s still no release date beyond “this year,” I’ve still had no reply from my emails to Trump Mobile, and the company’s social channels are still sitting silent. 

Trump Mobile hasn’t just promised a phone and failed to deliver it. No, like all good vaporware, it made sure to take people’s money first, with a $100 deposit required to place a preorder.

That’s money that early buyers may have been without for almost five months now. The thing about money — and please take this as whatever is the opposite of financial advice — is that it tends to make more money. Even if Trump Mobile had made no effort at all to build a single smartphone (and we have absolutely no evidence that it ever has!) those deposits alone would bring in income. How much?

Since we’ve already established that I am by no means a financial expert, I turned to the entirely legitimate sounding stoculator.com to find out more. According to stoculator.com — a site I trust implicitly — if the Trump family had invested $100 in on-again, off-again buddy Elon Musk’s Tesla on June 16th, when the Trump phone was announced, it would have $131.90 today, a profit of $31.90. If it had put that money into all-American Apple instead, it would be sitting on an even better $136.57, profiting by $36.57. Invested in the S&P 500 index, gains would be a little more modest: $110.79 by today, for a profit of just over $10.

Per phone, that ain’t much. But we don’t know how many preorders Trump Mobile sold, how many $100 deposits it managed to take, how many $30 returns it’s made — and how many people it’s deprived of making those $30 returns themselves.

The Trump Organization, once again, did not respond to a request for comment.