MAGA as right wing affinity fraud
By 
As an ideological movement, MAGA is fairly straightforward and uncomplicated: America is a nation founded by and for white Christians (“Christian” here has the rather specialized meaning it’s given in white Christian nationalist discourse, i.e., white Protestant evangelicals), and those who aren’t both members of this tribe and committed to maintaining or re-establishing its cultural and political dominance aren’t Real Americans, properly understood.
People who say Donald Trump doesn’t have any real political beliefs or ideology are obviously wrong about that: his whole public career is a many-decades long testimony to the fact that one big reason be became the unchallenged leader of the white Christian nationalist cult is that, to the extent he has political beliefs and ideological commitments, they’re just standard issue white Christian nationalism. In other words, Trump, like the tens of millions of Americans who make up his political base, is a white supremacist.
The greatest trick white supremacism ever pulled in America was convincing people that if you weren’t literally in the KKK and publicly advocating for Jim Crow and prophylactic lynchings you weren’t a white supremacist, just a “normal American” who was in favor of a color-blind meritocracy and what’s racist about that, political correctness/critical race theory/wokeism is the real racism [that one sentence from that one speech MLK gave that one time goes here]. White supremacy is merely the belief that it’s the natural order of things for white people to be running everything, and that this natural order will continue to exist, absent massive and per se wrongful intervention by a “socialist” government (“socialism” in right wing discourse means above all using the powers of the government to try to ameliorate the effects of white supremacy). This is what John Roberts believes today every bit as much as George Wallace believed it in 1960, although it’s considered extremely impolite to point this out.
As I say Donald Trump believes this too, not because he’s thought it through of course, since thinking things through has never been a practice of his, but because old white people in America are usually white supremacists, because that’s the factory setting, culturally speaking.
All this is true, but I believe it’s also fair to say that Trump’s fundamental life goal is not to advance white supremacy, which in his case like in that of so many others is merely a largely unconscious and reflexive set of beliefs, but rather to rip people off, brazenly and continuously:
Nearly 600,000 Trump supporters paid $100 each towards a gold smartphone that, nearly a year on, does not exist.
The Trump Mobile T1 phone was announced in June 2025 by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump as a patriotic alternative to Apple and Samsung, retailing at $499, and promising a ‘Made in the USA’ build.
An estimated 590,000 buyers paid a $100 deposit to secure one, collectively handing the venture roughly $59 million.
Can you guess what happened next?
As of May 2026, not a single confirmed customer has received the device. Now, a fresh wave of anger is spreading across MAGA forums after buyers received communication making clear that their money is, for all practical purposes, gone.
Wait, Donald Trump promised something in exchange for money, took the money, and then didn’t provide the thing promised? This actually happened?
The clearest signal yet that buyers may never see either a phone or their money came with a revised terms of service published on 6 April 2026. The updated document states explicitly that paying a deposit ‘does not constitute a completed purchase and does not create a binding legal contract.’ The payment is described as ‘a conditional opportunity to buy the device if Trump Mobile eventually chooses to sell it,’ with the company retaining all control over whether a phone is produced at all.
I’m sorry Padre, but you opted for our “never pay” policy, which quite clearly states that no claim you make will be honored. So there it is.
The T1 was sold from day one on the strength of a single, politically loaded promise: it would be built in America. Within days of the June 2025 launch, that language vanished from the Trump Mobile website. ‘MADE IN THE USA’ became ‘American-proud design,’ then ‘Brought to life right here in the USA,’ language that supply chain experts noted was legally and commercially meaningless.
Springsteen should do a song called “Made in the USA,” so that people can miss the point again.
Commenter DocAmazing sums up the state of play succiently:
The wonderful thing about right-wing affinity fraud: the victims learn nothing and don’t care about the victimization of others. There’s an unending crop of marks.
Speaking of which, Truth Social, a publicly held company, was just required to publish its first quarter financials, and . . .
For the first quarter, TMTG generated net sales of $871,200, up 6% year over year. The company reported a $405.9 million net loss and a $387.8 million adjusted EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) loss for the first quarter of 2026. The vast bulk of the losses were “non-cash losses including unrealized losses on digital assets, digital assets pledged, and equity securities ($368.7 million), accreted interest ($11.5 million), and stock based compensation ($11.8 million),” the company said in a press release.
Translation: Trump’s media company is generating slightly less than one dollar in revenue for every four hundred dollars it spends. P.T. Barnum and H.L. Mencken are spinning in their graves faster than neutron stars.