Being the POTUS comes with great power (and great responsibility, but that's a distant second) and almost anything is doable. But even the President – just like you and me – can't avoid the unavoidable: when a telco goes down, you just sit it out.Those who have gone through a bad phone service experience – a.k.a. everyone with a phone – can relate, and even more so:
AT&T users. That's the telco which got on Trump's bad side at the start of the week.
Naturally, President Donald Trump took to Truth Social to criticize
AT&T, the country's third-largest wireless carrier, expressing frustration with the technical issues during a scheduled conference call with Faith Leaders. Trump claimed
AT&T's equipment failed to function properly and urged the company to "get its act together", stating that the service disruption forced him to consider using another carrier in the future.
In his posts, Trump even called on
AT&T's leadership to intervene directly, even though he did not mention CEO John Stankey by name. Spoiler alert: I don't think the CEO and the IT guy (who could, in theory, fix whatever problem is present) are the same guy. It's like believing a politician could solve a country's problems – yes, it's important for the leader to come up with a strategy or a solution, but that's about it: things get done by other people.
Shortly after the messages were made public,
AT&T responded on X but did not provide specific details about the reported outage.
AT&T claims it's not its fault, although in an extremely polite tone. The former president's comments caused
AT&T's stock to temporarily dip amid heightened trading activity, though it eventually recovered.
These remarks come on the heels of an announcement from the Trump Organization, which recently licensed the Trump brand to a new wireless service provider called
Trump Mobile. The venture includes a promised $499 smartphone and could offer coverage through all three major wireless networks. When Trump's own phone service launches, I'd be happy to see a live demo of him trying to do the same and schedule a major conference call. If everything goes great, it'll be the best ad ever and undoubtedly, many will consider switching carriers.
