MAGA Is Slowly Starting to Wake Up to Truth of “Trump Phones”

MAGA fans just got screwed, again.

Hundreds of thousands of people who bought into the Trump Organization’s “T1 phone” last summer are still waiting to receive their devices, with no refunds in sight.

The Trump-branded phone was launched in June 2025, promising early adopters that they would receive the gimmicky gadget by September that year for a $100 deposit. Yet eight months later, loyalists still have nothing to show for their blind faith in the Trump family business, with no advertised release date on the Trump Mobile website.

“Hey, Trump supporter here,” one man said in a viral TikTok video. “This one goes out to Don Jr. and Eric … where the fuck’s my phone? I ordered three, no, four gold Trump phones in the summer.”

An estimated 590,000 buyers bought into the promise, supplying the Trump Organization with a cash influx of about $59 million total. But customers shouldn’t expect to get their money back anytime soon. After ordering a phone for tracking purposes, NBC News was met with various delays and excuses from the company’s customer support hotline when asking where it was. Though the company’s recently updated terms hints customers may be entitled to a refund, Popular Information reported that the hotline is unresponsive on the matter.

“600,000 people got the Trump phone. Scratch that. 600,000 people ordered the Trump phone, put $100 deposit down on it, and never got it,” posted an X user identified as MAGA Cult Slayer. “So where’s the $60 million Donnie?”

Interested buyers can still donate their hard-earned cash to the Trump family, however, as the Trump Mobile website is still accepting enrollees into their apparently nonexistent phone program.

It’s just the latest in a long string of controversies—and disappointments—surrounding the phone.

Originally, Donald Trump Jr. told podcaster Benny Johnson that the phones would be “built in the United States of America.”

“We have to bring manufacturing back here,” Don Jr. said at the time.

But within weeks of the site’s launch, all made-in-America language had been scrubbed from the product descriptions. Instead, the phone would be “designed with American values in mind,” and there would be “American hands behind every device”—strange marketing promises that could effectively mean anything.

The Verge found that the move away from American production wasn’t the only change made since the phone previewed last year: The advertised screen size of the Trump phone also dropped significantly, changing from a 6.78-inch screen to 6.25 inches, and initial advertisements listing the phone’s RAM at 12 gigabytes suddenly showed zero RAM specifications whatsoever.

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller had a Latina girlfriend in college who was “embarrassed to be seen with him.”

The Financial Times’ deep dive into Stephen and Katie Miller offered a troubling look into how the man who’s been waging a white supremacist crackdown on Latino immigrants ended up with a wife who goes on racist rants and urges women to have babies.

One passage mentions Stephen Miller’s only other publicly known relationship besides Katie, with a “light-skinned conservative Latina,” according to Jean Guerrero, author of Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda.

“He liked her a lot more than she liked him.… She was embarrassed to be seen with him, and didn’t want people to know he was her boyfriend,” Guerrero told the FT. The anonymous woman did not speak further with the publication when contacted.

While some online argued that this spurning could explain Miller’s hatred toward undocumented Latino immigrants, the FT piece noted that Miller expressed racism long before his Latina girlfriend was trying to avoid him in public.

Former classmate and friend Jason Islas told the FT that Miller called him one day in 1998, before the two started high school, and told him they weren’t friends anymore because he was Mexican. In high school, Miller’s yearbook quote came from Teddy Roosevelt: “There can be no 50-50 Americanism in this country. There is room here for only 100 per cent Americanism, only for those who are Americans and nothing else.”

“A kid being cruel to another kid is not that interesting,” Islas said. “What is interesting is that he continues down this path—clearly that’s calcified into something deeper and more powerful and menacing. He has this idea of how America should look, how power should look. It’s very Trumpy, and it’s very fascist.… It’s bound in aesthetics. He believes that the category of people who have rights, who are true Americans, look a certain way.”

Would it have been so hard to write a simple “Happy Mother’s Day” message?

Donald Trump unleashed a flood of AI-generated slop on Truth Social Sunday evening to cheer on his own flailing presidency. While Trump may have declined to publicly reference the fact that it was Mother’s Day, the president did share 10 posts from “Women for Trump.”

“I’m a Trumplican,” read one inscrutable post. 

“Trump’s the Real Deal! A True American Badass!” read another. 

Three separate posts declared Trump the greatest of all time, or “GOAT.” Another post included an AI-generated image of Trump’s face being added to Mount Rushmore. Yet another post urged the country to “BUILD THE BALLROOM.” Trump added a comment to this one: “It is going up fast!!!”

Trump shared posts from other sycophantic bots, with names such as Trump’s Army and Extremely Stable Genius. In addition to sharing posts that insisted on his own greatness, the president also shared posts bashing Democrats and former President Joe Biden. He also reposted a call to “arrest poll workers that cheated in elections.”

After boasting about receiving “Excellent Poll Numbers,” Trump shared another post claiming CNN hailed him as surpassing Ronald Reagan to become the the “most beloved president among Republicans.” It’s unclear what poll numbers he could’ve possibly been referring to, as Trump’s approval ratings have sunk to new lows. While one 2021 poll found that Trump was more highly regarded than Reagan, it’s doubtful he would be today. 

This torrent of crap didn’t come out of nowhere. Earlier Sunday, the president declared on Truth Social that Iran’s counterproposal to end the war was “TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE,” posted a screed claiming conservative members of the Supreme Court owed their loyalty to him, and shared his ongoing efforts to fix the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. He opined that Democrats “must fail” and complained about having to pay back billions in revenue after the Supreme Court struck down his illegal tariffs.  

Trump previously posted about Mother’s Day weekend, but only as an excuse to tout gains in new job numbers—after tanking job growth to practically nothing in 2025. 

Trump’s affinity for self-aggrandizing AI slop wouldn’t matter so much if he were just someone’s elderly relative posting on Facebook. But the president of the United States is clearly more interested in leading his own fan club than he is in, well, governing. 

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is once again lashing out at Democratic Senator Mark Kelly—this time for speaking freely about just how much ammunition the U.S. military has wasted in its war with Iran. 

Kelly told CBS’s Margaret Brennan Sunday that it was “shocking how deep we have gone into these magazines.”

“We’ve expended a lot of munitions,” he said. “And that means the American people are less safe. Whether it’s a conflict in the western Pacific with China or somewhere else in the world, the munitions are depleted.” 

These comments triggered Hegseth, who promptly took to X to make that known. 

“‘Captain’ Mark Kelly strikes again. Now he’s blabbing on TV (falsely & dumbly) about a *CLASSIFIED* Pentagon briefing he received,” Hegseth wrote on Sunday evening. “Did he violate his oath…again? @DeptofWar legal counsel will review.” 

While Hegseth emphasizes that Kelly’s report came from a classified congressional briefing, it’s not like the U.S. wasting munitions in this war is some big secret. In fact, Kelly even reminded Hegseth that it was something they discussed very publicly just days ago. 

“We had this conversation in a public hearing a week ago and you said it would take ‘years’ to replenish some of these stockpiles. That’s not classified, it’s a quote from you,” Kelly replied. “This war is coming at a serious cost and you and the president still haven’t explained to the American people what the goal is.”

This beef was incited months ago, when Hegseth had Kelly censured and tried to reduce his pension after he appeared in a video message  with other former servicemembers in Congress advising military personnel to refuse to follow illegal orders from the Trump administration. A federal appeals court last week appeared unlikely to allow Hegseth to punish Kelly for that basic statement, perhaps fueling the defense secretary’s current campaign against his fellow veteran. 

President Trump is desperately trying to take control of America’s elections—and he wants his own personal army to do it.

On Truth Social Sunday, Trump complained about Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer forming an elections task force led by former Attorney General Eric Holder, alleging that it would “no doubt try to suppress Republican voters, and interfere in our Elections.”

“The Democrats are totally unhinged and we will not allow them to threaten the integrity of our Elections,” Trump posted. “During my Historic Election in 2024, when I won every single Swing State, and decisively won both the Electoral and Popular votes by wide margins, the Republicans had an Election Integrity Army in every single State to preserve the sanctity of each legal vote. We will be doing the same again in 2026, but it will be much bigger and stronger. All Americans should have their voices be heard by casting a vote. Be assured this Election will be fair! President DONALD J. TRUMP.”

Trump’s words are odious, considering the actions that he and the Republican Party have taken already to interfere in the midterms and beyond. They’ve pushed for mid-decade redistricting that disenfranchises Democrats and Black Americans, they’ve continued to spread election-denial conspiracies from 2020, and they’ve installed people who support those conspiracies in local governments and election boards across the country.

Meanwhile, Americans’ faith in elections will only weaken. Rumors of ICE being deployed to the polls will grow, thanks to Republicans like Steve Bannon, frightening many people of color away from the polls. Democrats will have to come up with not only a legal strategy but a forceful one that ensures elections remain free and fair.

President Donald Trump can’t even keep track of his own conspiracy theories. 

During an interview on Full Measure, host Sharyl Attkisson pressed Trump about his allegations that someone had stolen from the country’s gold reserve at Fort Knox. 

“What happened to the audit of Fort Knox?” Attkisson asked. 

After a long pause, Trump replied: “Which one are you talking about?” 

Attkisson gently reminded Trump that shortly after he reentered office, he and Elon Musk both discussed auditing Fort Knox. In fact, they both cast doubt—without providing a shred of evidence—on whether the more than 4,600 tons of gold was still there at all. 

“Well, we wanted to go and knock on their door—Fort Knox, very thick door—and to see whether or not we have any gold in there. Cuz uh, we take a look at, it’s a very interesting question, yeah?” Trump said. “We played with that. I wonder if they left the gold in Fort Knox, cause they steal a lot.”

“No need to really do that though?” Attkisson asked, as if speaking to a child. 

“Well, I don’t know, I think that it’s uh, I do want to go to Fort Knox sometime, I want to see if the gold is there. Which I’m sure it will be,” he said. 

Trump appeared to have no memory of spreading rumors about the missing gold at Fort Knox, and to be unable to really commit to them just a year later. This comes as concerns over Trump’s mental acuity have been mounting, and the president has insisted he’s aced all three of the dementia tests he’s been forced to take.  

The president has publicly declared that the Supreme Court should cave to his whims, penning that it’s “OK” for his appointees to “be loyal.”

In a lengthy Truth Social rant Sunday, Donald Trump railed against justices he appointed to the nation’s highest judiciary, wondering how he’s supposed to “reconcile” rulings that he claimed were ideologically opposed to his agenda.

Trump called out Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett by name, whining that “they were appointed by me, and yet have hurt our Country so badly” by ruling against his tariff proposal. The Supreme Court deemed Trump’s “liberation day” tariffs illegal in February, throwing not only the White House’s wildly controversial economic plan but also the primary driver behind the administration’s foreign policy agenda, out of whack.

He blamed the fallout of his illegal tariffs on the bench’s decision, claiming that the Supreme Court—rather than the judgment of his own office—had cost the country $159 billion by putting the U.S. in a position to “pay back to enemies.” Trump further lamented that the justices should have specified that the U.S. did not need to pay anyone back for his office’s failure, and he did not seem to understand why the court could not have done so.

“With certain Republican Nominated Justices that we have on the Supreme Court, the Democrats don’t really need to ‘PACK THE COURT’ any longer,” Trump continued. “In fact, I should be the one wanting to PACK THE COURT! I’m working so hard to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, and then people that I appointed have shown so little respect to our Country, and its people. What is the reason for this?

“They have to do the right thing, but it’s really OK for them to be loyal to the person that appointed them to ‘almost’ the highest position in the land, that is, a Justice of the United States Supreme Court,” Trump wrote.

He baselessly claimed that justices appointed by Democratic presidents have “always [remained] true to the people that honored them”—a bold-faced lie that is regularly disproven, including in cases this year.

The sudden anxiety about his apparently fragile judicial loyalties appeared to be spurred by the court’s highly anticipated decision on birthright citizenship, a constitutionally protected right that Trump has attempted to dismantle since the moment his second term began. The court’s decision is expected to be released sometime in June.

Trump recalled his visit to the Supreme Court last month to sit in on the birthright citizenship hearings—a choice that made him the first sitting president in U.S. history to watch in person while the bench worked. He said that based on what he saw, he believes the court “will be ruling against us on Birthright Citizenship, making us the only Country in the World that practices this unsustainable, unsafe, and incredibly costly DISASTER.”

“I don’t want loyalty, but I do want and expect it for our Country,” Trump wrote.

He then specified that he has other ways of enacting his tariff agenda that are “far slower” than the plan deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, and suggested that the judiciary should step outside of their job and their oaths of office to consider what’s “good” for the country rather than what’s illegal.

“Well, maybe Neil, and Amy, just had a really bad day, but our Country can only handle so many decisions of that magnitude before it breaks down, and cracks!!!” Trump continued. “Sometimes decisions have to be allowed to use Good, Strong, Common Sense as a guide. A negative ruling on Birthright Citizenship, on top of the recent Supreme Court Tariff catastrophe, is not Economically sustainable for the United States of America!”

Americans could soon lose access to some widely used antidepressant medications.

As Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. prepares to wean the country off mental health medications, U.S. Health Department officials explored last week whether the department had the ability to ban certain treatments within a class known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, better known as SSRIs, Reuters reported Friday.

That class of drugs includes Zoloft, Prozac, and Lexapro, which have been approved for public use for decades. People familiar with the conversations did not reveal to Reuters which drugs the Trump administration is in talks to restrict.

HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon denied the report, declaring in a statement that Kennedy’s department “has not had any discussions about ​banning SSRIs, and any claims suggesting otherwise are false.”

Yet the writing is on the wall. Kennedy blamed the country’s mental health crisis on medication earlier this week, announcing at a daylong mental health summit that America is suffering from a “dependency crisis driven by overmedicalization” of mental health and wellness. Kennedy also unveiled new policies that he said would rein in the prescription of the widely used drugs, though he explained that while he intends to steer America’s health institutions away from prescribing psychiatric medications, those currently on them should not stop doing so.

Kennedy has railed against the use of mental health medication for years, even going so far as to spread falsehoods that antidepressants and other medications are the real underlying reason for school shootings and mass murder (as opposed to a lack of adequate gun control).

A 2026 study published in the medical journal BMJ Mental Health found that roughly one in six U.S. adults are currently taking antidepressant medications—an uptick from previous decades. Between 2005 and 2008, just 11 percent of people above the age of 12 were using the mood stabilizers, according to CDC data.

The American Psychiatric Association lists SSRIs as the first option for depression as an evidence-based treatment.

“There are a lot of prescriptions because there are a lot of folks with illnesses that can respond to these medications,” including depression and several anxiety disorders, Dr. J. John Mann of the New York State Psychiatric Institute told Reuters. “Restricting use of these medications is not justifiable medically.”

Two press freedom groups are warning that Larry Ellison may “implement the CBS playbook” at CNN by getting rid of all the anchors President Donald Trump doesn’t like.

In a letter sent Thursday to Paramount Skydance, Freedom of the Press Foundation and Reporters Without Borders demanded to see internal documents, alleging that there was “credible concern that Paramount leadership has offered, solicited, or effectuated a corrupt exchange: more favorable coverage of the Trump administration and its allies in exchange for favorable treatment by Trump administration antitrust and media regulators.”

The groups warned that since taking over Paramount, Ellison had “wielded the company to benefit Trump and cater to his preferences,” and had promised to do the same to CNN if given the chance.

Referring to a story The Guardian reported in November, the letter said: “Ellison reportedly raised the possibility that Paramount would include CNN in the purchase, then implement the CBS playbook: transforming CNN’s programming and firing anchors and commentators Trump dislikes.”

Following the Ellison takeover of Paramount, and the installation of Bari Weiss as CBS News editor in chief, there has been a talent exodus from the network, including Anderson Cooper, longtime 60 Minutes executive producer Bill Owens, CBS News producer Mary Walsh, and CBS Evening News producer Alicia Hastey. 60 Minutes host Sharyn Alfonsi will also reportedly exit her role at the end of May after clashing with Weiss.

Trump has repeatedly railed against CNN and lashed out at its stable of journalists, claiming the network is “fake news.”

Alabama Republicans approved two redistricting bills Friday, over the objections of Democrats and protesters who shouted their disapproval in the state Capitol. 

Republican Governor Kay Ivey immediately signed into law the legislation, which would redraw the state Senate map and allow for new congressional primaries in the state if the Supreme Court lifts an injunction against drawing new congressional maps before 2030. Voters had already begun casting ballots in this year’s primaries.

Protesters filled the state Capitol on Friday, shouting their disapproval of both bills, and at one point, debate was halted in the House.

“And I know we are going to redistrict here at some point, and we are going to look at some of the census data, and you are going to look at some of the people in this room, you are going to look at me in the face, you are going to shake my hand, say everything nice, and you are going to redraw my district so I can’t come back,” Democratic state Representative Chris England, who is Black, said during the debate. He and other Democrats brought up Alabama’s legacy of segregation and voter suppression.

But Alabama Republicans weren’t deterred. “Alabama now stands ready to quickly act, should the courts issue favorable rulings in our ongoing redistricting cases,” Kay said in a statement after signing the legislation. 

The move comes on the heels of the Supreme Court’s decision last week in Louisiana v. Callais, which gutted the Voting Rights Act and spurred Republican-led states across the South to begin redistricting procedures that would dilute majority-Black districts. But Alabama Republicans’ congressional effort may run afoul of that ruling, according to the ACLU of Alabama, which said in a statement that it was planning a lawsuit.

“For several years now, the court has been consistent: Alabama violated the 14th Amendment by intentionally discriminating against Black voters in its congressional and legislative maps,” ACLU of Alabama Director JaTaune Bosby Gilchrist said. “The Callais opinion even agrees.”