Exactly. I understand the confusion from some people who aren't as technical but thinking a Chinese phone is safer just because it isn't from an American company is not how any of this works. None of them have even remotely comparable hardware safety features than an iPhone or a Pixel does. That's not me saying Chinese phones are bad, it's just that it's not a concern in China.
Private? Sort of. Secure? No, and obviously if you're hacked it's not gonna be private either. Please stay far away from Fairphone. They may be good for sustainability reasons but they can't get their act together when it comes to making their devices even remotely secure. Not just that, they make a bunch of false promises about it.
Stay far away from LineageOS as well since you can't even relock the bootloader and establish secure boot.
Seriously though, simply put, anything other than an iPhone or a Pixel running GrapheneOS is a train wreck from a security standpoint. Samsung flagship phones technically rank third but it's a distant third. Keep in mind the vast majority of custom Android operating systems (they are not ROMs) will actually make things even worse.
Frankly it doesn't matter where your phone is manufactured or where the company's headquarters are. Even a backdoor in your modem is not gonna infect any modern operating system. Sure they can pinpoint your location but they can do that anyway just using cell tower triangulation. If you're concerned about that, just use airplane mode as much as possible.
Use GrapheneOS on a Pixel 8 or later. The reason why it only runs on Pixels is because no other phone manufacturer meets their security standards. Get it second hand if you don't want to support Google. The reason why it should be a Pixel 8 or later is because that's when they added support for hardware memory tagging, making it exponentially more difficult for you to get infected by Pegasus and other spyware. Honestly it's probably the most powerful hardware security feature developed in the past decade.
The only other phone with support for memory tagging is the brand new iPhone 17, nothing else supports it at the moment. Sure I guess this means you could also use an iPhone as long as you enable lockdown mode on it and make sure advanced data protection is enabled on your iCloud account.
A Chinese phone won't protect you against Israeli spyware. It just isn't designed for that from a technical perspective.
Actually something would change, we'd see a sitting president having intercourse with a couch on live TV.