Former US President Donald Trump was hit in the ear in an apparent assassination attempt by a gunman at a campaign rally today in Pennsylvania today, a shocking incident that will fuel fears of instability ahead of the 2024 US presidential election. Several politicians, tech leaders and followers of Mr Trump condemned the attack, stressing that political violence is intolerable.
Shortly after the news broke out, t-shirts featuring a defiant image of Donald Trump with blood visible on his face and fist in the air went viral online. According to a report in the South China Morning Post, within two hours after the attack, the first batch of the t-shirts went on sale on a popular Chinese e-commerce platform Taobao, owned by Alibaba.
Li Jinwei, a 25-year-old Taobao seller, got her T-shirts on her online stores before morning in China. Her factory is located in the northern province of Hebei. To produce new goods, she just needs to download an image and hit the print button. A T-shirt takes the factory half a minute on average to finish. "We put the T-shirts on Taobao as soon as we saw the news about the shooting, though we hadn't even printed them, and within three hours we saw more than 2,000 orders from both China and the US," she said.
"For this year's US presidential election, we only made souvenirs of Trump, as he has a higher chance of winning the election, and he is popular among Chinese netizens," she said.
According to Politico, the trend was not confined to China. US content creators HodgeTwins promoted on X images of T-shirts that said, "Fight! Fight! Fight!" and said, "100% of profits from this shirt go to Trump's campaign." Another picture featured a man with a shirt that read, "Shooting Makes Me Stronger" while a third said, "I Will Never Stop."
Meanwhile, Donald Trump, in his first statement after being shot at the rally, said, "I was shot with a bullet that pierced the upper part of my right ear. I knew immediately that something was wrong in that I heard a whizzing sound, shots, and immediately felt the bullet ripping through the skin." He added, "Much bleeding took place, so I realized then what was happening." Earlier in the statement, he stated, "I was shot with a bullet that pierced the upper part of my right ear."
