Former US President Donald Trump was struck in the ear in an apparent assassination attempt by a gunman at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania recently. This shocking incident will undoubtedly fuel fears of instability ahead of the 2024 US presidential election.
Several politicians, tech leaders, and followers of Trump condemned the attack, emphasizing that political violence is intolerable.
Shortly after the news broke, 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 t-shirts went on sale on the popular Chinese e-commerce platform Taobao, owned by Alibaba.
Li Jinwei, a 25-year-old Taobao seller, managed to get her t-shirts on her online store before morning in China. Her factory, located in the northern province of Hebei, can quickly produce new items by downloading an image and hitting 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, even though we hadn't printed them yet, and within three hours, we received 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 added.
According to Politico, the trend was not confined to China. US content creators HodgeTwins promoted images of t-shirts on X that said, "Fight! Fight! Fight!" and stated, "100% of profits from this shirt go to Trump's campaign."
Another picture featured a man wearing a shirt that read, "Shooting Makes Me Stronger," while a third said, "I Will Never Stop."
