How to Evaluate a "False Flag" Claim

Or, How a Makeup Artist Would Fake a Sniper Attack

This post has been updated and slightly expanded as information has trickled out to the public. My conclusions related to the wounds, appearance, blood (etc etc) have not been challenged in any way by the emerging facts. As is normal in the aftermath of all newsworthy shootings, information about the shooter, weapon, etc., has changed rapidly and repeatedly, and some of that appears to partially contradict some of my initial thoughts at this time. I have attempted to leave my original reasoning intact when the developing story contradicts my tentative conclusions, while also adding in the latest information that has become available.

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The attempted assassination attempt of former President and current Presidential Candidate Donald Trump has opened a few windows onto the changing nature of our civilization, which I will deal with in a post tomorrow. But as the crews get on about cleaning up the blood from the stands, here’s an analysis of the kinds of things a professional audio engineer, makeup artist, and stage magician would look for to figure out whether he’d just been bamboozled. So, our question today:

Was this a False Flag Operation?

False Flag Suspicion

At the time of this writing, the predictable speculation about whether this was a False Flag operation (which, in our current environment, is, alas, fairly reasonable) is already coming hot and heavy. Is this shooting staged by the Trump campaign to give the candidate his Bull Moose moment?¹

The story I’m getting forwarded by partisans on the left side of my acquaintance circle is that someone used an “Airsoft” rifle or a “BB gun” to make the “popping sounds” at the rally, and then Trump dropped down and popped a blood pellet to smear his face. The reasons advanced, other than their reflexive suspicion of Trump and their horror at the boost this might give him in the polls, is that the sounds were really light on the live feed, and that the blood on his face looked like it had been streaked on with his fingers.

I’ve spent twenty years in the performing and visual arts. I’ve done gore effects on about a dozen independent films (features and shorts) and a further dozen live-theater events, as well as on photo shoots of my own. I’ve been pierced, punctured, punched, stabbed, and generally ripped open in a number of misadventures and I’ve got the scars to prove it. I’ve produced list of concerts, albums, audiobooks, podcasts, and radio dramas as long as my arm. My history with firearms stretches back to childhood and my expertise on the subject is well documented in what was, for a time, the definitive introductory guide on the subject.

Today’s incident presents a really good opportunity to separate the reality of violence from the version of it we see in the movies, so here we go.

I will be proceeding as if you’ve watched the incident. If you haven’t, here’s a video of it (start watching at 0m33s):

Wounds and Blood Packs

Here we see blood capsules. These are typically held in the hand or the mouth, and then popped at an opportune moment to release fake blood for theatrical effect. If this were a staged incident, then that “reach up to the ear” move would have been when Trump popped a palmed blood capsule and smashed it into his ear. Then, when he dove to the ground, he would have streaked the blood across his face, either incidentally or purposefully. He then would have wiped his hands off so that they wouldn’t be bloody when he rose to do his fist pump.

So far, so plausible.

Now, let’s look at a picture of his wounds and see what they tell us.

The first thing that leaps out to you is the blood on his ear, and the dark spot in it. That dark spot is a hole—the symmetry on it doesn’t match the shadow lines on the rest of the ear. The blood could easily be faked, with a bit of practice, by a good stage magician (or under the tutelage of one), but the hole...not so much. The blood dispersal pattern is also a problem for a faker—the top-of-ear smear looks like one would expect for a blood-load ear smash, but the completeness of the coverage, and the active flow down into the ear canal are a lot harder to fake. This bullet wound is genuine.

Now, look at the two streaks, which might be bullet grazes. This would be where he would have had to smear the blood.

First, the bottom streak appears, from this angle, to begin with a thumbprint on the bottom lip, then wanders all over the place. However, if we look at it from the following photo that emerged a little after this article’s first publication, we can see that it looks a lot more like Trump split his bottom lip when he was diving for the ground or getting piled on by the Secret Service.

The top streak, though, while it seems to have been touched at the point where the upper lip crease meets the cheek swell, is pretty much dead straight if you assume that Trump’s forehead was tilted forward and facing his assailant when he was shot (which seems to be the case on the video). This could be a bullet graze.

But this isn’t conclusive by itself, and there are other factors to examine. The forward part of the streak begins on his lip, and I can’t quite tell if the mark where the lip flesh meets the skin is an indentation from a wound, or just a shadow. Further back, though, on the upper streak, I’m seeing a slight inflammation of the skin tissue around the graze wounds. That only happens when you’ve actually been scratched.

Try it now—scratch the underside of your arm just hard enough to draw blood. You’ll notice that before the blood flows, the scratched tissue puckers and turns pink, and raises as if in a slight welt. This is the skin’s first-line response to injury, when it’s damaged above the layer where the blood supply is. This inflammation response, too, can be faked, but to fake it this well takes about twenty minutes in a makeup chair with a makeup artist who is very accustomed to doing wound makeup so that it will stand up to close-up shots on 35mm film or Hi-Def video.

What would happen during those twenty minutes?

First, you lay down a base layer of skin-colored foundation along the wound track, carefully feathered so that it didn’t totally obscure the pores, and so there wouldn’t be a detectable transition between skin and makeup.

Then, atop that, you run a thin pencil line slightly darker than the color of the inflammation down the middle of the foundation. Then, using a brush, you feather that out so that there is also a smooth-but-definite transition.

Once that’s done, you take some fake blood that’s almost as thick as gel and dab it along the wound track, which simulates the blood gobbing out of the deeper parts of the wound. Then you top it off with some thinner-viscosity blood that’ll read as genuine.

Now you’re ready for prime time.

That, combined with the irregular weight of the streak (despite being straight) leads me to think that the upper streak is at least partly either a bullet graze wound or a scratch he sustained when diving for cover.

To explain about the irregular weight:

Some points along that top line appear to be bleeding at a slightly faster rate than other points. That’s exactly what you would expect from a real scratch or graze wound, where the cutting object sliced deeper into high points on the skin than low points. That’s not impossible to fake, but it’s pretty damn difficult, especially in the time available.

The available evidence suggests that the wounds are real.

Those “Popping” Sounds

[Note: Fifteen minutes after publication, I am reading reports that show part my analysis of the weapon used and shooter position may be incorrect. I have footnoted the relevant bit with what the emerging story is saying. As always, such stories change fast in the early hours, so time will tell what the real story is. In the meantime, I have otherwise left my analysis untouched so you can see how reasoning from a small set of facts works, and where it can potentially fail.]

That’s all well and good, but what if the wounds are real because he hit his head on the way down?

Let’s ignore the track-like characteristic of the apparent graze wound and consider whether someone in the audience might have used a BB gun or other non-lethal apparatus to simulate an attack for the sake of publicity.

Listen to the gunshots. It’s hard to make out because of the acoustics of the environment, but I hear a tight group of three shots, each followed quickly by an echo of the report, which tells you the approximate size of the venue (not more than 300ft across). I then hear a second cluster of shots from two different kinds of weapons, and a total of between six and eight distinct shots in this cluster.

First, the elephant in the room:

If those are real gunshots, why are they so quiet? And why are they so high pitched?

In the movies, most guns have a subsonic boom mixed in to give them a sense of presence and effect. And, in the movies, the gun sound effects—when authentic to the gun being fired—are generally recorded on shooting ranges, at close range, with favorable acoustics. That means that you’re hearing, at best, something like what you’d hear if you were holding the gun. At worst, such as with the sound effect that Indiana Jones’s revolver makes, you’re hearing the sound of a much larger weapon, or several different weapons, mixed together.

In real life, in an outdoor environment without high sonic reflection, most consumer firearms—especially the most common calibers, such as the 9mm and the .223 (the lower-powered round fired by a stock AR-15, among many others)—sound about the same as a firecracker.

So, that’s the first reason they “don’t sound like real guns.”

The second is dynamic range compression.

News crews and live sound crews put hardware devices in-line with their microphones so that hard pops, mic drops, sudden screams, and other sharp noises won’t get amplified and blow out the recording and/or damage the ears of the crowd (or the sound engineers). These hardware devices are called “compressors,” and their job is to sharply attenuate any sound over a certain volume, while amplifying quiet sounds. Used correctly, they allow your favorite vocalist to scream and whisper into the same microphone in the same performance, and it all sounds pleasant and intelligible to your ears.

When you fire a weapon within ear-shot of a dynamic-range compressor, it does what it’s supposed to do:

Cut the volume.

The louder the sound is, the quieter it becomes until the compressor “lifts” and the system returns to its baseline amplification.

So, in this situation, you can’t identify the caliber of the weapon used by the volume—you have to do it by the frequency (that is, the pitch) and the other firing characteristics, such as the rate of fire and whether the bullet is supersonic or not.

How can you tell if the bullet is supersonic?

If it hits before you hear the report (which is, granted, a lot harder to judge at close range).

What Kind of Weapon?

First, we can safely dispense with the BB gun hypothesis. Aside from the bullet wound in Trump’s ear in the picture above, there’s also the issue of the sound. When you listen to the video, you can hear a distinct two-beat sound on every shot. That two-beat “click-thwomp” sound is the report and reflection.

The report is the sound the gun makes when it fires a shot. The reflection is the echo produced when that sound bounces off the environment and hits your ear a little bit later. In real life, with the sound uncompressed, the reflection is significantly quieter than the report, but here that’s not the case—because of the dynamic range compression, it sounds like a solid two-syllable sound, like someone hitting a snare and a bass drum in rapid succession.

The sound is fairly high-pitched, which means we’re not dealing with a high-powered rifle or a magnum-load handgun. It didn’t sound like a mosquito flew past the microphone on Trump’s podium, so we’re not dealing with a .22. This weapon fired small bullets, but not that small—either a .223/5.56 (teeny bullets fired by the stock AR platform) or a 9mm handgun (or similar).

The spacing of the first three shots tell me that the shooter is using a semi-automatic weapon—i.e. one that fires one bullet for every pull of the trigger—not an automatic (which fires faster), and not a revolver (which fires slower). The spacing of the shots on Trump’s face tells me that there are a few possibilities:

1) the shooter is using a rifle or a pistol-brace on an AR-platform weapon. In this case he either

a) was not a very good shot or

b) he was using iron sights (instead of a scope)

Why? A good shot would be able to hit a not-moving-much human head at that range without a problem. The AR platform is very accurate at that range.

2) He could be using a pistol such as any one of the hundreds of models of 9mm handguns that are easy to conceal.

So which one was it?

When I first watched it, the high pitch led me to think it was a .223/5.56² round fired from an AR-platform weapon or similar. As I’ve been writing this analysis I had a few dozen more listens (and on several different recordings with different sound profiles), I’m currently thinking it was a 9mm handgun.

Why?

Well, first, he got two shots off before Trump was out of his sight picture, but he only hit on the first shot. A rifle or braced AR pistol has a lot of mass and it’s easy to keep steady between shots. On a small plastic semi-auto 9mm, on the other hand, the muzzle tends to climb like it was trying to win a mountaineering award.

Second, the range between the shooter’s position (apparently in the bleachers facing the stage, at stage right) and his target was about 25 yards, which is a long shot for a little plastic 9mm.³ Even a really good marksman could easily pull left far enough to hit an ear instead of a forehead. The follow-up shots went high because of muzzle climb, and didn’t hit at all (especially because the shooter panicked, as you can hear by the rapid-fire of the two follow-up shots).

Third, and most important, rifle bullets all travel over the speed of sound.⁴ Trump can be seen reacting to his ear wound after we hear the first shot and before we hear the second, but for a long-range rifle shot we would hear the report after the impact. Now, if this was a rifle from close range, the closeness wouldn’t matter, but if it was fired from a sniper position over a hundred yards away (see footnote at bottom of article) this time lag would definitely show up.⁵

So who was this guy?

Well, I don’t know yet, because I haven’t checked the news to see if he’s been ID’d, but I’ll guarantee you one thing:

He has no close combat training.

No professional in their right mind would aim for the head when he had a good shot at the body. Had he aimed for Trump’s body, the muzzle climb on his weapon would have presented a head-shot as his first or second follow-up (the triple-tap version of this technique is called a Mozambique and is a 201-level combat training move), giving him plenty of opportunity to put holes in his target before he made good his escape or the Secret Service gunned him down—which they apparently did.

That’s the second volley of shots. In that volley you hear several high-pitched shots and one lower-pitched shot, then another trailing lower-pitched shot. The high pitch shots are most likely Secret Service side-arms, and you’ll notice how closely they match in tone to the assassin’s weapon. That lends credence to “9mm not .223” (and is what ultimately led me away from the rifle theory before I saw the final piece of evidence below).⁶

The lower shots you hear in the second volley are high-powered rifle shots, and you can tell that they’re rifle shots rather than reflections because of that trailing shot at the end, which comes far too long after the volley to be anything but a shot report. The lower pitch rounds are probably 7.62mm, since several of the Secret Service’s standard issue rifles fire that and they have that bass-y thud to them, but it could be something bigger as well (like the 300 Winchester, which some SS sniper rifles use, or the 300 Blackout, which some SWAT departments are starting to use. I am unable to identify which rifles the Secret Service snipers are using from the footage I have access to at this time).

Update: Audio Forensics confirms part of the above analysis.

[Note: See first footnote after “the final piece of evidence” for an update to the breaking story]

And, in case you’re thinking that my call is wrong on all of this—that it’s a false flag or that it was done with a rifle, I present the final piece of evidence:⁷

That bullet whizzing by Trump’s head it travelling too slow⁸ to be a supersonic round (it would have been much more smeared), and it’s way too big to be a BB or Airsoft round, and too copper-jacketed for Airsoft, too.⁹

Case closed.

Watch this space (or subscribe below) for a deep dive on the historical context of this assassination attempt and what it can tell us about the context we’re living in.

[UPDATE: A reader has brought to my attention this Twitter/X thread written by a copy who has worked Presidential security details. It analyzes the security situation and offering his thoughts on the weapons situation. https://x.com/LtTimMcMillan/status/1812383798740324380?t=SvsUrojDiZoIC86MzjVsSg&s=19 ]

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1. I will cover the Bull Moose incident in my history series post tomorrow.

2. The emergency story show that my initial reaction about “what kind of weapon” may have been correct. If the emerging story holds up, the analysis here, based on a dozen or two-rewatches, will have been skewed by instrument bias due to mic placement by the news crews. I have left the whole analysis intact so you can see the original reasoning.

3. And, as a reader reminds me, this is a long shot for a 9mm even for a body shot.

4. UPDATE: The 147gr stock load for the 9mm are subsonic, and they’re what most casual users will grab due to their price and their low recoil. However, as a weather-eyed reader points out to me, there is a bottomless supply of heavier loads and combat loads that are supersonic.

5. Emerging information make it look like there is actually a delay of the type described. See following footnote for more details.

6. UPDATE: This assumption was based on the rapidity of fire in the volley and the other assumption, made elsewhere in this article, that we were dealing with a shooter in the crowd who was using a handgun. See later footnotes for further evidence which casts those assumptions into doubt.

7. Footage of the—or at least an—alleged shooter has been posted by TMZ and mirrored to twitter. The footage shows the shooter on an inclined roof some distance from the event, and quickly dispatched after shots start flying. https://x.com/Ayah2156/status/1812341859852661142

If this guy is the shooter, that puts paid to my call of “9mm and not .223.”

One question occurs to me, though:
The photo of the bullet shows a flat or slightly downward trajectory, which matches a distant roof shot well enough. However, the shooter in the clip is shown on an incline shooting upward over the crest of a roof. That doesn’t match the photo of the bullet—nor does it match what I currently understand of the venue geography.

However, camera angles, especially divorced from context, can be quite deceptive. More updates to come as the story unfolds.

UPDATE:

An aerial photo of the shooter’s body has emerged.

You can see here that the shooter was much nearer the crest of the roof than it appears in the other video, meaning that he would plausibly have had a good slight-down-angle shot on the podium as well as good stabilization. The weapon by his side is an AR-15 style semi-automatic, which is normally chambered in .223/5.56, but could be easily chambered in any other caliber (such as 300 Blackout subsonic).

However, further review of the footage has led me to think that Trump may have been hit by the second shot, not the first. The delay between his reaction and the subsequent report at a 130 yard range is about right. If this is the case, then we should expect the caliber to ultimately be confirmed as a garden variety .223/5.56.

As far as “Why is his weapon so far away from his body?” In the footage posted at the top of this footnote we can’t see his actions. It’s very plausible that, upon being fired on, he might have rolled away from his gun to save himself, only to be nailed on a follow-up shot.

FURTHER UPDATE:

A reader alerted me to the fact that other weather-eyed analysts spotted on Sunday that the Secret Service counter-sniper changing his angle of view in such a way that he could not have been shooting down into the crowd.

8. UPDATE: Just as I hit publish, the New York Post published its analysis saying that the shooter was not at the event, but shooting from a roof 130 yards away. I haven’t read it yet, but there are a number of reasons to doubt this, including-but-not-limited-to the fact that the Secret Service routinely puts snipers on all roofs with an eyeline to the protected person up to a quarter mile away from the potential target.

The story is developing fast, and given that I don’t know the position of all the microphones, etc., some or all of this part of the analysis could be wrong. Nonetheless, the exercise is valuable.

Time will (hopefully) tell what all went down.

9. This is an educated guess based on my years of working as a photographer in the 35mm and related DSLR formats—assuming that the photographer is using a hefty Neutral Density filter, which I would in sunlight that bright, the shutter speed required to get this shot at this focal length in these lighting conditions would be slow enough that I would expect more smear from a supersonic bullet.