Former US President Donald Trump was shot in the ear by a gunman in an alleged assassination attempt at an election rally in Pennsylvania today, a shocking incident that will further fuel fears of instability ahead of the 2024 US presidential election. Several politicians, tech leaders and followers of Mr Trump condemned the attack and stressed that political violence is intolerable.
Shortly after the news broke, T-shirt A revolting image of Donald Trump with blood on his face and a fist in the air has gone viral online. According to a report South China Morning PostWithin two hours of the attack, the first batch of T-shirts went on sale on Taobao, the popular Chinese e-commerce platform owned by Alibaba.
Taobao seller Li Jinwei, 25, ordered his T-shirts on his online store before dawn in China. His factory is located in the northern province of Hebei. To create new items, he simply downloads an image and presses the print button. It takes the factory an average of half a minute to produce a T-shirt. “We put the T-shirts on Taobao as soon as we saw the news of the shooting, even though we hadn’t printed them, and within three hours we had received more than 2,000 orders from both China and the U.S.,” he said.
He said, “For this year’s US presidential election, we only made Trump souvenirs because he is more likely to win the election, and they are popular among Chinese netizens.”
According to politicoThe trend was not just limited to China. US content creator Hodgetwins promoted a T-shirt on XImage that read, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” and added, “100% of profits from this shirt will go to the Trump campaign.” Another photo showed a man wearing a shirt that read, “Shooting makes me stronger” while a third said, “I will never stop.”
Meanwhile, in his first statement after being shot at the rally, Donald Trump said, “I was shot in the upper part of my right ear. I immediately knew something was wrong, because I heard a loud sound, shots were fired, and immediately realized that the bullet had ripped through the skin.” He further said, “There was a lot of bleeding, so I realized what was happening.” Earlier in the statement, he said, “I was shot in the upper part of my right ear.”
