A day after former US President Donald Trump had a narrow escape when a shooter fired at him, several T-shirts with slogans like 'My President is bulletproof', 'I will never stop fighting for America' and 'Shooting makes me stronger' have been selling like hot cakes in China and the US.
In an subtle dig at President Joe Biden, one of the T-shirts read 'Grazed but not Dazed. The bullet fired at Trump had grazed his upper right ear. “Dazed” apparently referred to claims about Biden's alleged cognitive decline following the setback during the first presidential debate with Trump.
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These t-shirts have the images of a defiant Trump with a clenched fist as the Secret Service moves him to safety following the shooting. Costing between $9 and $40, the T-shirts hit the market within hours of shooting.
"(The sales) exceeded my expectations. I didn't expect that Trump would have so many fans," Reuters quoted Zhong Jiachi, 28, owner of Paxinico, which sell clothes via Douyin, the Chinese version of Tiktok. The retailer reportedly sold around 40 T-shirts with Trump shooting slogans within 24 hours.
Li Jinwei, 25, a seller on Alibaba's Taobao platform, claimed that it just takes around half a minute to produce such T-shirts 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 told South China Morning Post.
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Trump was reportedly shot at 6.31 pm local time on Saturday and by 8.40 pm, the merchandise began selling on Taobao.
Allen Yao, co-founder of Guangdong-based Xinflying Digital Printing Production, which opened an automated factory in California, said there is high demand for election related T-shirts in the US and they are producing 3,000 T-shirts currently. Yao said the capacity will be increased to 8,000 by August.