After months — months — of emailing various official Trump Mobile accounts and press addresses, last week someone answered back. Don Hendrickson, a member of the company’s executive team, finally replied to one of my emails and offered to talk, but he’s ignored me ever since.
Last week I reported on the unexpected news that Trump Mobile is working on a second Trump phone, a more powerful T1 Ultra. That information came from an old, ignored interview Hendrickson did with Wireless Dealer Magazine.
Hendrickson’s name isn’t new. He was one of three executives — alongside Pat O’Brien and Eric Thomas — that Don Jr. and Eric Trump brought on stage for a small press conference at New York’s Trump Tower in June 2025 to announce the company. The Trumps claimed there were an impressive, if implausible, “hundreds of years” of mobile industry experience between the three men.
Hendrickson’s share of that experience is the trickiest to pin down. During the launch event, he was described as having worked in the mobile industry since the days of pagers, but his actual resume is hard to find. I can only find one LinkedIn profile that might be his — a mostly blank listing for a “wireless professional” — and no other public social media profiles or websites.
As for Hendrickson’s present work at Trump Mobile, Reuters has reported that he’s Trump Mobile’s head of mobile operations, while Wireless Dealer Magazine identifies him as the company’s president. In the interview, he himself claims to have had the idea for the company, and to have turned to the Trumps to make it happen.
I did find one lead. A directory site lists him as the executive vice president of sales at Liberty Mobile Wireless. This suddenly makes sense: If you remember, Liberty Mobile is the freedom-centric MVNO that seems to underpin Trump Mobile — the Trump network’s online terms of use state that it is “powered by Liberty Mobile Wireless LLC.”
This proved my in. That same directory website lists a Liberty Mobile email address, and so I took my chances and sent him a message asking if he could confirm the details discussed in his November interview, and perhaps add more information on plans for the T1 Ultra. If you’ve been following my reporting on Trump Mobile so far, you can probably guess that I never expected to hear back (I have, to date, sent the company’s official press line 12 emails over five months and not received a single reply).
Imagine my surprise when, less than two hours later, I had a response:
That was a little over a week ago, and those remain the only words that anyone officially involved with Trump Mobile has ever said to me. I’ve sent Don three emails since — I’m sure breaking most dating advice on how to handle being ghosted — but been ignored every time. I don’t know how to feel, having gotten so tantalizingly close to a real conversation with a real human being who might have answers to all of my questions, only to have it all evaporate away.
I don’t know if Hendrickson still wants to talk, if he still thinks that it’s time for Trump Mobile’s voice to be heard. I don’t know if Pat O’Brien or Eric Thomas share his feelings — I’ve tried to contact both, with no replies yet. I don’t know why Hendrickson suddenly went quiet, if he got spooked or was advised to stop chatting to journalists.
But hey, at least now I’ve found a Trump Mobile address I can email each week that I know someone is actually checking.
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