A Trump Mobile U.S.-Made Phone For $499? That’d Be a Tall Order
BY WILSON ROTHMAN AND BEN RAAB
The Wall Street Journal
Jun 17, 2025
The Trump Organization said it would launch a mobilephone service called Trump Mobile and plans to sell a $499 T1 Phone beginning in August with some features that beat the current top iPhone.
The gold Android phone, a press release said, would be “proudly designed and built in the United States.”
The question is: How? President Trump has targeted phone makers in his tariff push, threatening extra levies on Apple if it didn’t shift to U.S. production. No major smartphone maker currently makes its products in the U.S., as the displays, processors and cameras they use are mainly sourced from Asia.
In April, The Wall Street Journal investigated what it would take to make an iPhone in the U.S. Supply-chain experts agreed the U.S. would need years and many billions of dollars to establish the factories and skillsets needed to match China’s output. And even if it were possible, the labor and infrastructure costs would be astronomical, leading to phones whose build costs are many times those of the iPhone.
A spokesman for the Trump Organization said in an email that “manufacturing for the new phone will be in Alabama, California and Florida.”
Despite language in the press release, Eric Trump, one of the president’s sons, indicated that the first wave of phones wouldn’t be built here. “You can build these phones in the United States,” the Trump son told podcaster Benny Johnson Monday after holding up a gilded device that looked like an iPhone. “Eventually, all the phones can be built in the United States of America. We have to bring manufacturing back here.”
So it’s possible—even plausible—that these phones would initially come from China because, at that price point, only Chinese makers like Xiaomi and Oppo have hardware to match.
“There’s absolutely no way you could make the screen, get that memory, camera, battery, everything” in the U.S., said Tinglong Dai, a professor of operations management and business analytics at Johns Hopkins University’s Carey Business School.
Dai estimated it would take “at least five years” for the U.S. to establish the infrastructure necessary to make “Made in USA” smartphones a real possibility. He also played down the push to move smartphone manufacturing to the U.S. More immediately, the focus is on building technology such as semiconductors and medical devices, Dai said.
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