Rumors swirled online in the minutes and hours after Donald Trump was shot on Saturday as users scrambled to identify the person responsible. One social media user was even misidentified on X/Twitter as Thomas Matthew Crooks, the 20-year-old Pennsylvania man who was killed by the Secret Service at the Trump rally. And now that man’s face is popping up on t-shirts for sale online, even though he had nothing to do with the shooting.
TeeWorksUSA, ChoiceTees USA, and Father Figuring Clothing are all currently selling t-shirts that use the man’s face who was incorrectly identified as the shooter. It’s not clear what the man in question’s real name is, but he went by @jewgazing on X and appears to have contributed to the confusion by making jokes about how he looked like Thomas Matthew Crooks. The man even made a video that started by falsely identifying himself as Crooks. By the end of the video, he acknowledges he wasn’t the person who shot Trump without saying it quite explicitly enough to clear up all the bad tweets.
“My name is Thomas Matthew Crooks,” the man says in a since-deleted video tweet that’s still preserved in several places on X. “I hate Republicans, I hate Trump, and guess what… you got the wrong guy.”
JUST IN: The viral picture claiming to show 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks is not actually him pic.twitter.com/bhnozpcXe2
— Unlimited L’s (@unlimited_ls) July 14, 2024
But even if he didn’t quite say things explicitly enough, the shooter is dead and this man is clearly alive. A yearbook photo of the real Crooks was obtained by the Washington Post and shows the shooter when he attended Bethel Park High School in Pennsylvania in 2020, as you can see below. There’s a resemblance between the two men, but they’re different people.
There are also plenty of websites that are selling products with photos of Trump in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, as ABC News points out. Etsy already has thousands of products, including coffee mugs, wall art, and all manner of clothes. The most popular photo from Saturday that’s being used on the goods was captured by Associated Press photographer Evan Vucci. And Trump himself has even started running ads with the image on Facebook.
“I will NEVER SURRENDER!” the Facebook ad reads. “I will always love you for supporting me. Unity. Peace. Make America Great Again.”
There are also questions about how aggressive photographers and the organizations that own the rights to these images will be in pursuing legal action against people who use them without authorization. But judging by the AP’s statement to ABC News today, it seems like they’re fully prepared to go after anyone using the images without permission.
“The Associated Press is proud of Evan Vucci’s photo and recognizes its impact,” Lauren Easton, the AP’s vice president of corporate communications, told ABC News. “In addition, we reserve our rights to this powerful image.”
The AP famously sued Shepard Fairey over the unauthorized use of one of its photos to create a poster of President Barack Obama that read “HOPE.” Fairey eventually settled with the AP after he destroyed evidence in the case and faced criminal charges over that conduct. Fairey received probation in 2012.
Intellectual property aside, there will always be plenty of people hoping to make a buck on the internet from whatever images are going viral. And there’s no question that the attempted assassination of a former president who also happens to be running again makes for some eye-catching images. That’s especially true when there’s already a cult of personality around Trump, whose entire agenda is an extreme far-right plan to remake the country and act as a dictator on day one.
There are still plenty of fringe websites that have the wrong photos misidentifying the shooter. And countless conspiracy theories have popped up alleging everything from a Secret Service cover-up to the idea that Crooks wasn’t actually the attempted assassin. Roger Stone, a Trump ally who was pardoned by the former president, even appears to have started a rumor that the real shooter was a guy named Maxwell Yearick, an assertion with no evidence to back it up.
The conspiracy theories will obviously continue for the days, weeks, months, and years to come. But one thing we know for certain is that the man identified as @jewgazing is not the shooter who attempted to take out Trump over the weekend.
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