Trump Supporters Paid $59M For a Phone That Doesn't Exist

An FCC official has confessed to censoring Disney, immigrants are being arrested for calling 911, and Trump-supporting coal miners are dying of iron lung thanks to him

Good afternoon. I’m Ryan Rose, and this is AlterNet America.

The Trump family is selling a phone that doesn’t exist and keeping the deposits. The FCC is openly threatening Disney for airing a late-night host who told a joke. Immigrants are being arrested for calling 911. And the administration wants coal country to keep mining while it quietly kills the only rule that might keep miners from suffocating to death.

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590,000 Trump Supporters Paid for a Phone That Doesn’t Exist

In June 2025, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump took the stage at Trump Tower to announce Trump Mobile. The pitch was simple: a gold-colored, American-made Android phone called the T1, $499, proudly built in the United States of America, and available for a $100 deposit.

An estimated 590,000 buyers collectively handed over roughly $59 million in deposits. Not a single one of them has received a phone.

Promised delivery windows of late summer 2025 slipped to November, then December, then the first quarter of 2026. By April, Trump Mobile quietly removed all shipping estimates from its website entirely. At one point, a customer service representative blamed the federal government shutdown for the delay.

Trump Mobile is a private company. The shutdown had nothing to do with it.

The “Made in America” promise also quietly dissolved. Within days of the June 2025 launch, claims that the phone would be domestically produced were quietly removed from the website. “Made in the USA” became “American-proud design,” then “brought to life right here in the USA,” then “designed with American values in mind.”

Then came April’s terms of service update. The published terms make clear the company does not guarantee the device will ever be produced or made available for purchase, a perfectly on-brand outcome from the family that brought you Trump University and Trump Steaks.

The FCC Is Threatening Disney Over Jimmy Kimmel’s Jokes

Here is something that doesn’t happen often: a sitting federal regulator writing a letter to a private company’s CEO to warn them that her own agency is being weaponized against them.

That is what happened Monday. FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez sent a letter to Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro warning that ABC has been a victim of a “sustained, coordinated campaign of censorship and control” by the Trump administration. She decried the political “weaponization” of the federal media regulator under Chairman Brendan Carr, a Republican appointed by Trump.

Gomez’s letter said that the FCC’s recent demand that Disney apply to renew broadcast licenses for eight of its local TV stations, its probe into the ABC talk show The View, and its decision to reopen a complaint into how ABC moderated a 2024 presidential debate between Trump and Kamala Harris were “not a series of coincidental regulatory actions.”

Gomez also noted that all of this escalated after ABC paid Trump $15 million to settle a defamation lawsuit. As she put it in the letter: that settlement did not buy them peace.

The FCC has not revoked a broadcast license in more than four decades. Disney’s licenses weren’t even scheduled for renewal until 2028. The review was initiated one day after the White House called for ABC to fire Jimmy Kimmel over a joke about Melania Trump.

It all started with a Jimmy Kimmel monologue. As most major constitutional crises do.

The press is under attack and the government isn’t even pretending otherwise anymore. What you can do about it, right now, today, is make sure the outlets telling you the truth have the resources to keep doing it. Hit the button below and become a paid subscriber.

Immigrants Are Calling 911 for Help and Getting Arrested by ICE

The most dangerous thing an immigrant can do right now is ask for help.

In December, Axel Sanchez Toledo called 911 to request a welfare check on his 4-year-old daughter after hearing she’d fallen sick while staying with his ex-girlfriend. When officers arrived, one took Sanchez Toledo’s ID, retreated to the patrol car, and returned to tell him he was being detained for ICE.

This is not an isolated incident. Across the country, immigrants are learning that dialing 911 can end with deportation. The effect is exactly what you’d expect: people who need emergency help are not calling. They are waiting and hoping the situation resolves itself.

Domestic violence hotlines are reporting fewer calls from immigrant communities. Emergency rooms are seeing patients who waited days before seeking care. Fire departments in sanctuary cities have begun fielding questions from residents about whether calling for help is safe.

Local emergency services also say that federal immigration enforcement is making their jobs harder. Several described scenarios where witnesses to crimes would not come forward, where accident victims fled before ambulances arrived, and where neighbors watched emergencies unfold rather than risk a call.

ICE and the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office have not explained themselves. Nobody has checked on the kid.

Black Lung Is Killing Coal Miners and Trump Keeps Delaying Regulations

The Trump administration has declared coal essential to national security, signed executive orders funneling billions toward the industry, and made “beautiful clean coal” a rhetorical centerpiece of its energy agenda.

It has simultaneously gutted the agency responsible for keeping coal miners alive.

Researchers estimate that black lung disease now afflicts one in 10 miners who have worked in mines for at least 25 years. The surge is being driven by silica dust, crystalline particles released as miners cut through rock that act like shards of glass in the lungs and eventually cause the most severe form of black lung disease. There is no cure.

In April 2024, the Biden administration finalized a rule cutting the allowable level of airborne silica dust in coal mines in half. The Department of Labor projected the rule would avoid at least 1,067 deaths and 3,746 cases of black lung among working and retired miners.

The Trump administration has delayed implementation indefinitely. When the administration came into office, it cut MSHA’s budget and staff.

The agency had already been operating at a disadvantage: coal mine enforcement staff has been cut in half over the last decade. Ninety newly hired mine inspectors had their job offers rescinded.

The miners dying from black lung voted for Trump by enormous margins. The rule that would save them is sitting on a desk in Washington collecting a different kind of dust.

Why AlterNet America Exists — And Why We Need You

The threat of losing a broadcast license has kept journalists in line for decades. Nobody even has to pull the trigger. The chilling effect is the whole weapon. Disney is learning that firsthand right now, and every other broadcaster in the country is watching very carefully to see how it plays out.

We don’t have to worry, because AlterNet America doesn’t have a broadcast license. We don’t have a parent company, a corporate owner, or an advertiser who can be pressured. What we have is you. We’re funded by nobody but the people reading this right now. If you’re not already a paid subscriber, become one today. Hit the button below.

Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you tomorrow.

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