President Donald Trump continues to drill holes in the Ship of State under the Jolly Roger of authoritarian leadership. The recent sinking of a Venezuelan boat by the American military appears to provide one more powerful example of the dangerous course he has set.

The event was portrayed as a drug-war victory against the now internationally infamous Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. The obliteration of an open-hull boat with 11 people aboard was celebrated by Trump administration officials and the president himself.

A black-and-white video of the moment of impact was quickly shared with the American public.

In the giddy aftermath of this mismatched victory at sea, Trump said, “There was massive amounts of drugs coming into our country to kill a lot of people, and, everybody fully understands that. Obviously, they won’t be doing it again. And I think a lot of other people won’t be doing it again. When they watch that tape, they’re going to say, ‘Let’s not do this.’”

Retired Drug Enforcement Administration Chief of International Operations Mike Vigil also saw the tape. In an interview this week, he had a very different reaction.

“When I heard Donald Trump say that they destroyed a boat coming out of Venezuela that was carrying a lot of drugs — and he reemphasized a lot of drugs — that struck a chord with me,” Vigil tells me. “There’s no way that you can tell that they’re carrying drugs unless you stop them and you send a boarding party aboard. And there was never a need to sink a suspected drug trafficking vessel. Not once.”

Vigil knows of what he speaks. In a career spanning three decades, Vigil rose from street undercover agent to supervise all DEA offices and operations outside U.S. soil. He participated in hundreds of maritime efforts as an agent and supervisor, operations that netted hundreds of arrests and many tons of drugs. Working with other agencies and foreign counterparts, the DEA racked up successes from the coast of northern Colombia outside Barranquilla throughout the Caribbean to Miami and far beyond during Vigil’s career.

Then there were the alleged culprits, members of Tren de Aragua. Vigil is very familiar with the gang.

“That right there put both of my antennas up because the Tren de Aragua is not engaged in transportation,” Vigil says. “They have never used maritime routes to transport drugs.” But, he adds, “The DEA closed down its office in Venezuela during Hugo Chavez’s regime in 2005, so there is little intelligence coming out of the country.”

Vigil suspects those on board were migrants, not gang members. Thanks to the shoot-first-collect-evidence-later strategy, there was no one to interrogate.

“You always want to capture them so you can find who their sources were and pursue lines of investigation,” he says. “What they did was just unconscionable and showed no decency. What I find amazing is that they’re bragging about it like this is a major accomplishment.”

The Trump administration’s own video raises several serious questions about the veracity of the drug-smuggling claim.

If a boat that size was to be used to smuggle drugs for a long distance, Vigil says, it would need extra barrels of fuel on board to complete the crossing. And far fewer crewmembers in such a small boat.

“Never, never in my 31-year career — and I saw hundreds of those type of drug operations — they never put 11 people on board,” Vigil says. “Usually, it’s just three or four. They want to maximize the room for drugs.”

It was, he says, a job suited for the U.S. Coast Guard, which has long worked with DEA on maritime operations.

“The Coast Guard, which has primary responsibility for intercepting these types of ships, does a very good job,” Vigil says. “They use a loudspeaker system to give them orders to stop. If they don’t stop, they fire rounds in front or behind them. If they need to, they shoot out the outboard motors and make them stop. Then they send a boarding party.

“In this case, they did none of that. They just decided to kill these people. They completely disregarded the rules of engagement and the use of lethal force, which are very clear. They have the ability to intercept that boat, but they decided just to summarily kill these people.”

It’s no wonder the incident is being ridiculed in Washington. By Thursday, White House cheerleaders had something more to consider after a Venezuelan minister confirmed that those killed on the boat weren’t Tren de Aragua gang members at all.

"A murder has been committed against a group of citizens using lethal force," Venezuelan Minister of Interior, Justice and Peace Diosdado Cabello Rondón said in a Reuters report, echoing Vigil’s own questions. How could the U.S. determine whether drugs were on board, and why weren’t the so-called suspects arrested?

The incident continues to reverberate far beyond the United States. Vigil, who is regularly quoted in news reports throughout the U.S. and Latin America, says the military action is being perceived as a dangerous sign of aggression, which adds to suspicions that the Trump administration intends to send military forces on foreign soil, especially Venezuela or Mexico, under the pretext of stopping narcotics trafficking.

“Even if they had caught these guys with drugs, they would have never received the death penalty,” Vigil says, adding that it has the signs of an attempt to divert American attention from a worsening economy, foundering foreign policy and the Epstein pedophile scandal. “It’s no wonder many people believe the Americans can’t be trusted and are planning military action in Latin America.

“They acted as judge, jury and executioner of these people.”

John L. Smith is an author and longtime columnist. He was born in Henderson and his family’s Nevada roots go back to 1881. His stories have appeared in New Lines, Time, Reader’s Digest, Rolling Stone, The Daily Beast, Reuters and Desert Companion, among others.