In a narrow escape incident of shootout at former US President Donald Trump at the Pennsylvania rally on Saturday, his image of showing fist went viral globally with China stepping ahead and selling T-shirts of the illustration. The gunman Thomas Crooks, who fired at the rally six to eight times, from a distance of approximately 400 feet left one rally attendee dead while two others were critically injured. Trump was also hit on his ear, and the bleeding image of the former president went viral. While service agents surrounded the Republican nominee, his reaction to the assassination attempt showing a fist with bleeding ear got imprinted on t-shirts in China with the price tag of $4 on e-commerce websites. Taobao and JD.com, two of the largest online players in China, swung into action after the attempted assassination to profit from the viral images. According to the Associated Press, “Make America Great Again,” read one T-shirt, “Shooting Makes Me Stronger,” read another. Although the websites weren’t directly showing T-shirts related to Trump’s assassination attempt, the links to them were hidden. It could be due to image’s copyright infringement. Since the internet in China is cut off from the global internet and is largely controlled by an extensive censorship system which even monitors the e-commerce websites. Trump survived the shooting in Pennsylvania and announced that he would not be taking any break and would follow the schedule of the ongoing Republican National Convention. In a post on his social media platform Truth Social, Trump said it “was God alone who prevented the unthinkable from happening.” Denouncing the violence in any form, President Joe Biden criticised the attack on Trump and said it is not what America stands for. Biden said, “We cannot, we must not, go down this road in America. We’ve travelled it before throughout our history.”
