A new mobile phone announced by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump earlier this year and branded around their father is still nowhere to be seen three months past its planned release — with NBC News reporting Monday that the launch date still remains unknown despite the company having already charged customers for pre-orders.
The company’s website has also scrubbed past mentions of the phone being “built in the United States” since its initial announcement in June, and instead now touts “American hands [being] behind every device.”
As part of its investigation, NBC News paid the company the $100 pre-order fee in anticipation of its initial launch in August. Making five separate phone calls to the company’s customer support line between September and November, one operator told the outlet the phone was slated to ship on Nov. 13.
That date came and went, and a subsequent phone call to the company yielded a new date: “beginning of December,” the outlet was told regarding when the phone would ship, and that the phone’s delay was caused, in part, by the government shutdown.
The Trump-branded phone – dubbed the T1 – is just one of a slew of products that the Trump Organization has licensed its trademark for. Other examples include the Trump Watch Collection, which was personally promoted by Trump with costs for individual watches up to $100,000, and the “God Bless the USA Bible,” a Trump-endorsed Bible that netted Trump $1.3 million in payouts.