The Big Story 

The Trump family’s new mobile phone venture promises to build its golden smartphones in the U.S., an endeavor that experts warn will be nearly impossible in the current manufacturing environment.

© AP Photo/Richard Drew

Trump Mobile’s T1 Phone will instead likely be forced to grapple with international supply chains that rely heavily on China and have been complicated by President Trump’s own tariff regime.

“It is exceptionally difficult to see how a smartphone like the T1 device would be truly made in the U.S.,” said Leo Gebbie, an industry analyst with CSS Insight.

“[For] anyone who digs beneath the surface, it will be incredibly clear that this simply is not a realistic claim and ultimately devices cannot be made in the U.S. because of the strength of the Asia supply chain, which is so far advanced and significantly further ahead of anything that exists in the U.S. at this moment in time,” he added. 

The Trump Organization, currently helmed by the president’s sons, announced it would be launching a mobile phone business Monday — the anniversary of Trump’s descent down the golden escalator at Trump Tower, which marked his entrance into politics. 

Trump Mobile plans to offer a $47 phone plan, an homage to Trump’s tenure as the 47th president, as well as the golden smartphones. The T1 Phone is meant to go on sale in August for $499. 

“You can build these phones in the United States,” Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son, told podcaster Benny Johnson. “We can do it cheaper. We can do it better. And eventually, all the phones can be built in the United States of America. We have to bring manufacturing back here.” 

Trump Jr.’s focus on reshoring manufacturing largely lines up with the efforts by his father’s administration, which has repeatedly cited an expansion of U.S. manufacturing capabilities as the driving factor behind its wide-ranging tariff regime. 

However, experts have cautioned that bringing smartphone manufacturing back to the U.S. is largely unrealistic, requiring billions of dollars of investment over decades. 

“I think it’s a nonstarter that you could produce phones in the U.S.,” Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives said. “Could they produce a few hundred, a few thousand? Possibly.” 

“But we don’t see this getting off the ground,”  he continued. “And I think they’re going to encounter the same problems that Apple and other smartphone makers have had and why they don’t produce in the U.S.” 

Read more in a full report at TheHill.com.

Welcome to The Hill’s Technology newsletter, we’re Miranda Nazzaro and Julia Shapero — tracking the latest moves from Capitol Hill to Silicon Valley.

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Crypto Corner 

Crypto caught up in Iran-Israel conflict 

© Getty Images

Welcome to Crypto Corner, a daily feature focused on digital currency and its outlook in Washington.

An Israeli-linked group appears to have hacked Iran’s largest crypto exchange — Nobitex — amid increasing conflict between the two nations. 

Blockchain analytics firm Elliptic estimated the Israeli group, known as Gonjeshke Darande or Predatory Sparrow, transferred more than $90 million out of Nobitex’s crypto wallets.

The Israeli group claimed they conducted cyberattacks against Nobitex on Wednesday, one day after also claiming it was behind the hack of a state-owned Iranian bank. 

The group said it targeted Nobitex for facilitating terrorism financing and sanctions evasion. 

The hacked funds are currently held by addresses featuring explicit language aimed at Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Elliptic said. 

The funds appear to have been effectively destroyed by the hacking group and Elliptic suggested it is “computationally infeasible” to create addresses with such long text strings, meaning the hackers likely do not have the private keys to access the funds.

Incidents like this have sparked security concerns in the past about the crypto industry and the potential for crime on these platforms. Crypto advocates often dismiss these concerns, arguing it is easier to track and block illegal transactions over the blockchain. 

In 2023, a bipartisan group of more than 100 lawmakers demanded answers from the former Biden administration about the role crypto played in financing Hamas’s October 7 attacks on Israel that year. 

Speculation was stoked by a Wall Street Journal report in 2023 that Hamas received about $41 million in crypto over the previous two years. 

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