HONG KONG (Reuters) – The attempted assassination of Donald Trump has spawned a frenzy of online merchandise featuring a picture of the U.S. presidential candidate just after he was shot, with slogans such as “Bulletproof”, “Legends Never Die”, “Grazed but not Dazed”, “Shooting Makes Me Stronger.”
With prices ranging anywhere from around $9 to $40, T-shirts emblazoned with images of Trump pumping his clenched fist in the air while blood streaks across his face have gone viral.
Within hours of the shooting, businesses and independent sellers scrambled to create slogans and merchandise – mostly depicting the Republican presidential candidate as defiant – in what has become the latest in a long line of Trump products.
“(The sales) exceeded my expectations. I didn’t expect that Trump would have so many fans,” said Zhong Jiachi, 28, owner of Paxinico, a clothing merchant on Douyin, the Chinese version of Tiktok, who sold around 40 T-shirts with the image of Trump just after he was shot, within 24 hours.
Li Jinwei, 25, who sells goods on Alibaba’s Taobao platform told Hong Kong media it took roughly just half a minute to produce a Trump T-shirt at her factory in China.
“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 United States,” she said.
The look of Trump glaring into a camera, which appears in much of the previous merchandise that features him, echoes his trademark pose in “The Apprentice,” the reality television show he starred in for several years.
In 2023, a mughost of Trump was quickly turned into T-shirts, shot glasses, mugs, posters and even bobblehead dolls by friends and foes alike.
On Saturday, supporters and campaigners quickly embraced the image of Trump taken just after a 20-year-old man shot at him from a rooftop as they rally around him ahead of the U.S. presidential election in November.
The former U.S. president was holding a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania – a key state in the Nov. 5 election – when shots rang out, hitting his right ear and leaving him bloodied.
(Reporting By Marcus Lum in Hong Kong and Sophie Yu in Beijing; Writing by Anne Marie Roantree; Editing by Angus MacSwan)
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