Does Trump Mobile know how many stripes are on the American flag?

Where is Trump’s phone? We will continue to talk about it every week. We’re here, as usual, to ask where Trump’s phone is. This week, although we hope for the best, we don’t have our phone – but we have new doubts about our patriotic details.

These have been crucial days for Trump Mobile, as it taunted opponents by announcing that its phones would stay. shipping to buyers this week. Not that there is any indication that the company has actually done this, but I digress. The reason I want to talk about today is the American flag.

I’m not American, which probably explains why I didn’t immediately notice something in the design of the T1 Phone… And, no, I don’t mean the gold finish, the difference in the camera lenses, or the fact that it looks suspiciously like a two-year-old HTC phone. I mean the US flag that is prominently displayed in the background. At first glance, to non-natives, it looks good. But look closer, and there is something remarkable: It has only 11 stripes. Last I checked, there should be 13.

The 13 stripes represent the 13 territories that broke away from British rule to fight for their independence, so maybe you shouldn’t just cut off two of them. What is still unknown is Trump Mobile they changed their logo to show an error. Check the details for the latest phone model I was featured in Februarywith its large T1 logo (luckily since removed), and you’ll notice the flag on the bottom has the correct stripes. Someone on Trump Mobile changed the logo to stripes outside final release. Under the same president they want to ban flag burningand walking worse near the edge of the law.

There is a sympathetic reading in all of this. Look at the two versions of the sign and you will see that the “Trump Mobile” sign under the flag has moved a fraction of an inch closer, about the same distance as the other stripes are from each other. Maybe now it should be line 13, which can feel like a mockery in its own way. That may be a naive design, but it is not necessarily useless.

But that He doesn’t explain this week’s promotional video for the phone. While it usually shows the phone’s color scheme, with an 11-line logo, there is one high-resolution, slow-motion, close-up image that shows… nine lines. Nine!? There is no denying this and false claims about “smart” logo design, they are wrong, as you can see. And it’s really confusing: Why does the logo change on the phone between different shots in the video?

The obvious idea, of course, is to create AI. Perhaps Trump Mobile just quickly released Grok for a “promotional video for a gold phone with stripes that match the American flag.” It seems possible, because it’s not the only discrepancy: The texture of the phone’s golden color is different, frosty in some shots and bright in others. The design of the mobile phone also changes, as does its box – I count three different colors each. Surely AI itself can be inconsistent?

Maybe… however, things aren’t going to be easy when it comes to Trump Mobile. Because there is another surprise in this video: a brief glimpse of the camera part, easy to miss but invisible. You may have already thought of this, but in the next shot, it is nowhere to be found. The AI ​​doesn’t seem to be able to trigger scratches, so that’s it he was a real phone somewhere in the video – poorly maintained, badly shot – but it’s probably mixed in with the AI-generated animations alongside it.

It’s enough to shake one’s confidence that Trump Mobile actually has phones ready to ship. So far I can’t find a single person online who claims to have had a shipping warning, let alone a phone. For our part, we haven’t had an email notifying us that the two phones we ordered are ready to ship, and logging into our Trump Mobile account gives no clear indication that the company has our order. There is one box labeled “T1 deposit,” but it just lists the information about the cell plan we didn’t order and says “Expiry Date: Submitted.” It is not clear what is expected to end, beyond my expectation of receiving a call.

For what feels like the time of the century, I reached out to Trump Mobile for comment. For the first time, I had to ask them if they knew how many stripes are on the US flag.

Do you have any inside information on Trump Mobile or Trump’s phone? Reach safely from your device to tips@theverge.comor our vision How you can help us page.