Is the Trump Phone a Total Rip-Off? iFixit Exposes the Truth

A detailed teardown by the experts over at iFixit has exposed the $499 Trump Mobile T1 smartphone, revealing the device is actually a rebranded, gold-painted HTC U24 Pro from 2024.

Despite heavy marketing emphasizing “American innovation,” “American-proud design,” and built-in “American values,” the teardown confirms that the device is fundamentally an existing, Chinese handset with a fresh coat of paint.

The team at iFixit acquired a T1 retail unit through a partnership with NBC News. Technicians began their investigation non-destructively by utilizing an industrial X-ray CT scanner. The internal imagery quickly exposed the reality of the hardware, showing that the internal component layout, screw patterns, and circuit paths trace for trace matched the HTC U24 Pro, a mid-range smartphone originally released by the Taiwanese company in 2024.

To remove all ambiguity about the origin of the phone, iFixit technicians performed a physical mainboard swap. The team carefully pulled the core circuit board completely out of an HTC U24 Pro and installed it directly inside the chassis of the Trump Mobile T1. The cross-branded combination powered on and booted into the operating system flawlessly, proving that both smartphones share an identical underlying hardware architecture.

“What you have is not an ‘American-Proud Design,’ but a phone designed in China, made in China, with the vast majority of parts sourced from China,” wrote Shahram Mokhtari, a lead technician at iFixit, in the official teardown report. “I’m failing to find any stirring of American pride within me.”

While the baseline platform is identical, featuring a Qualcomm Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 processor, 12GB of RAM, 512GB of internal storage, and a 6.8-inch curved screen, the teardown did reveal a handful of minor physical adjustments.

The Trump Mobile team lengthened an internal flash memory cable by a few millimetres to slightly shift the position of the rear camera flash. Additionally, the external aluminum housing features a minor cosmetic edit to the lower speaker grille, swapping out six pill-shaped holes for seven circular ones. The exterior is wrapped in a distinctive gold-coloured paint job and finished with an 11-stripe American flag graphic on the rear panel.

Because the device relies entirely on a white-label hardware template, iFixit has issued a low 3-out-of-10 provisional repairability score.