(Reuters) -Just hours into Trump Mobile’s Monday launch touting American-made smartphones, the venture pulled its coverage map after sharp-eyed users noticed a curious detail: the body of water south of Texas was labeled as the Gulf of Mexico instead of the Trump-preferred name, Gulf of America.
The name of the international body of water has been a hot-button issue after President Donald Trump signed an executive order early in his second term, renaming it the Gulf of America, a name other countries reject. He has since barred the Associated Press news agency from certain White House events, triggering a lawsuit, as AP continues to use the international name, Gulf of Mexico.
The Trump family licensed its name to the U.S. mobile service, the latest venture aiming to cash in on the president’s political and cultural influence. A Reuters review of the website’s code shows Trump Mobile appears to have used T-Mobile’s network data for its coverage map. The telecom operator’s coverage map labels the body of water as the Gulf of Mexico.
The map stirred up chatter across social media before being removed, with numerous users posting screenshots of the old map. As of late morning on Tuesday, a link to Trump Mobile’s coverage map returned an error, saying the page could not be found.
The Trump Organization did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the coverage map being taken down from the website.
Trump Mobile is powered by Liberty Mobile Wireless, a Florida-based company founded in 2018 by entrepreneur Matthew Lopatin. The company operates as a mobile virtual network operator, renting bandwidth from major carriers such as T-Mobile to offer its own service under a different name. The new venture also promised a gold smartphone eventually available for $499, though it did not say who would make the phone, as the U.S. has almost no domestic smartphone manufacturing.
(Reporting by Akash Sriram in Bengaluru; editing by David Gaffen and Rod Nickel)
