Trump Mobile’s origins lie with a Mexican middleweight boxer

Where’s the Trump phone? We’re going to keep talking about it every week. Last week, we spoke to executives from the company for the first time, and this week we’re back with more details on how it began.

Trump Mobile may bear the US president’s name, but he didn’t come up with the idea, and neither did any Trump. In fact, it was the executives at MVNO Liberty Mobile that approached the Trumps with a pitch for the company, and it wasn’t their first rodeo; five years earlier, Liberty Mobile tested the same playbook with world champion boxer Canelo Álvarez.

That’s according to Don Hendrickson and Eric Thomas, the two Trump Mobile executives I spoke to last week, when they gave me a first look at what they said was a near-final version of the T1 Phone. Or, as Hendrickson repeatedly put it, when they decided to “open the kimono” to me and reveal more about the workings of the company.

Hendrickson has previously claimed to have come up with the initial idea for Trump Mobile. Talking to me last week he didn’t take full credit, but did say that the idea arose from conversations with the marketing team at Liberty Mobile — the MVNO owned by Hendrickson, Thomas, and fellow Trump Mobile executive Pat O’Brien. It was Hendrickson, however, who successfully pitched the idea to the Trump Organization.

“I got on a plane. I went down to Florida,” he told me. “I met with Eric Trump and his team and basically said, ‘Here’s what we would like to do. Here’s what we think we can do and here’s how we think we can help the American people.’”

What I didn’t realize before speaking to Hendrickson is that they’d tried this before. Only that time, it was with the boxer Canelo Álvarez. “We had a Canelo Mobile program with him and it was going out to service Mexican Americans here in the US, and we were looking at doing something along those lines,” Hendrickson said.

Canelo Mobile launched in May 2020 with familiar promises: wide-ranging cell coverage, perks like free international calling and roadside assistance (from Drive America, the same service bundled in with the Trump plan), and affordable Android phones, all bolstered by the presence of a famous name.

Canelo Mobile launched with two phones, dubbed The Legend and The Champ, and eventually added a third, The Contender. It made little effort to hide what they really were: handsets made by Hotpepper, a budget brand that has provided devices to budget MVNOs including Visible and Metro, along with the federal free phone program Lifeline. There’s not even a Canelo logo on the hardware, with Hotpepper’s distinctive chili logo in place instead. I reached out to Hotpepper for comment, but the support email on its website bounced.

Canelo Mobile did a better job of branding its accessories. It sold at least two separate pairs of over-ear headphones that bore Álvarez’s lettermark, and at various times sold different phone bundles advertising branded Bluetooth speakers, earbuds, baseball caps, keychains, and more.

The phones were really differentiated by their software, which supposedly included a selection of preinstalled Canelo apps. Those included the money-sending app Broxel, still one of the boxer’s sponsors, along with Álvarez’s I Can workout app, which was being marketed by an Instagram account as recently as last November but no longer seems to be available to download for either Android or iOS. They were joined by CaneloRx, a platform to buy discount prescription drugs, a move Trump himself is repeating.

Just like Trump Mobile, every element of Canelo Mobile’s cell service was powered by Liberty Mobile — Hendrickson tells me that Liberty is “umbilically connected” to Trump Mobile, even if that connection is slightly opaque to prospective customers. For Canelo Mobile, the connection was more explicit, with Liberty co-branding the service alongside Álvarez himself.

Anyone trying to predict Trump Mobile’s future may be curious to know how long Canelo Mobile lasted. After launching in 2020, there were no posts to either its Instagram or Facebook pages after July 2022. Its website stayed alive a few years longer, but Wayback Machine archives suggest that its images and formatting began to break by February 2025, and now the website is entirely offline, with the canelomobile.com domain up for auction. There is no mention at all of “Canelo Mobile” on the boxer’s current website. I reached out to Álvarez’s publicist for comment, but didn’t receive a reply in time for publication.

It’s hard to tell if Canelo Mobile was a success — its social media profiles each only have a couple of thousand followers, and it never garnered much media attention — but presumably it made enough money for Liberty Mobile to justify a second attempt.

The biggest difference between the two companies is that Trump Mobile has placed much more emphasis on the idea that it’s manufacturing its own hardware, which Hendrickson calls a way to “differentiate” from the competition. “There’s never been an MVNO or a carrier that has built their own phone,” Hendrickson told me. Other carriers have offered branded hardware, of course — T-Mobile has had its own Revvl phones for years — but they’re built under contract by white-label manufacturers. Trump Mobile, with its “final assembly” in Miami, claims to be more directly involved.

It’s hard to square that, though, with Hendrickson’s insistence that the company is first and foremost an MVNO. When discussing the business’s future, he’s far more keen to talk about adding new phone plans and expanding the MVNO internationally than he is about building more handsets. Hendrickson calls the T1 Phone “this little thing that we wanted to do,” while Thomas says the company’s goal “is to get subscribers … the phone is a tool that helps with that.”

“We’re in the razor blade business, we’re not in the razor business,” Hendrickson says, emphasizing that Trump Mobile’s business is selling mobile plans. That’s to customers’ benefit, or so the argument goes: Because the phone isn’t the “profit center” for the company, Hendrickson says it can be sold at “a much thinner margin,” resulting in a more affordable product. I’m not convinced the Trump phone is such a good value — its updated spec sheet mostly matches other Android midrangers, many of which are cheaper, and may fall short of them depending on details like wireless charging or water resistance. The company’s refurbished Apple and Samsung phones are also clearly bad deals.

Then again, the question of value is part of why Hendrickson, Thomas, and O’Brien jumped ship from a boxer to a reality TV star-turned-president in the first place. Canelo Mobile was cheaper than Trump Mobile, even accounting for inflation. Plans were advertised starting from $15 per month, with phones from $199.99. By contrast, Trump Mobile’s only available plan is $47.45 monthly, and the T1 Phone is currently listed at $499 but expected to go up in price following its eventual launch, potentially close to double that. Trump, they explain, is a premium brand.

“You think of Trump and I immediately think of quality. I think of a higher-level brand,” Hendrickson says. “For us it’s about honoring that brand, honoring that legacy of quality and integrity.”

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