Will Trump Be The American Duterte?

DWT isn't the only news source which has noted the scary similarities between Trump and Filipino authoritarian crackpot Rodrigo Duterte. This week Adrian Chen fleshed out the claims-- and fears-- for New Yorker readers: When A Populist Demagogue Takes Power. He's using a war against drugs to have anyone he wants killed with impunity-- over 3,000 since he took office in May.

A foul-mouthed, homophobic bully and compulsive liar, Duterte paints himself as a rebel opposing the Philippines' entrenched elites, who he has termed "feudal." Like Trump, he keeps promising to behave more presidentially. and sometimes he does-- for a few days.

Duterte does not, as he has put it, “give a shit” about human rights, which he sees as a Western obsession that keeps the Philippines from taking the action necessary to clean up the country. He is also hypersensitive to criticism. “Duterte’s weakness is, really, he’s a tough guy,” Greco Belgica, a Filipino politician and an ally of Duterte’s, said. “You do not talk down to a tough guy. He’ll snap.”

...Duterte thinks out loud, in long, rambling monologues, laced with inscrutable jokes and wild exaggeration. His manner is central to his populist image, but it inevitably leads to misunderstanding, even among Filipino journalists. Ernie Abella, Duterte’s spokesman, recently pleaded with the Presidential press corps to use its “creative imagination” when interpreting Duterte’s comments.

...What began as a reaction to a personal slight has led to a dramatic shift in foreign relations. Duterte has increasingly, if fitfully, signalled his intention to distance himself from the United States, the Philippines’ closest ally, in favor of China, which previous governments have viewed warily. In September, he called for the withdrawal of a contingent of U.S. military advisers and for the end of annual joint combat exercises between the two nations. (Last week, he approved limited exercises.) During a state visit to Beijing in October, he announced a “separation” from the United States. “America has lost now,” he told a group of Chinese businessmen. “I’ve realigned myself in your ideological flow. And maybe I will also go to Russia to talk to Putin and tell him that there are three of us against the world: China, Philippines, and Russia.”

As Erwin Romulo, a former editor of Esquire Philippines, told me, “There are no slow news days anymore in the Philippines.”

Duterte has an eighty-six-per-cent approval rating in the Philippines, but his break with America has proved controversial. Opinion surveys regularly find the Philippines to be among the most pro-American countries. The language of instruction in schools is English, and basketball is a national obsession. Around four million Filipinos live and work in the U.S., and the country is one of the Philippines’ most important trading partners. American interests have typically made up a large proportion of foreign investment in the Philippines. In the Manila Standard, the widely respected former President Fidel Ramos compared Duterte to the captain of a sinking ship. Even many on the Philippine left, who decry U.S. influence, worry that Duterte may be trading one imperial master for another.

Duterte’s pivot to China is a rebuke to the Obama Administration’s foreign-policy shift away from the Middle East and toward Asia. But a senior State Department official said that he thought the talk of a complete realignment with China was largely bluster. “The issue is not so much what he says—the issue is what he does,” the official said. He pointed out that the U.S. and the Philippines are so deeply entwined that it would take longer than one Presidential term to unravel their ties. “That said, if he’s absolutely determined, he could do a lot of damage to the U.S.-Philippine relationship.”

Since the overthrow of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos, in 1986, the Philippines has been a democracy, if an often dysfunctional one. Duterte’s actions challenge the liberal Western values that are enshrined in the Philippine constitution. Although he styles himself a revolutionary, Duterte seems uncertain about what kind of order will replace the one he aims to overthrow, or whether he will be around to see it. He often intimates that he may not live to finish his term, whether because of overwork and age-- he is seventy-one-- or something more sinister. “Will I survive the six years?” he asked recently. “I’d make a prediction: maybe not.”

...Duterte's campaign had a rocky start. In a speech announcing his candidacy, he rambled on for more than an hour, offering an account of personally killing kidnappers and setting their car on fire, pledging to kill “up to a hundred thousand criminals” when elected, and boasting of his womanizing. “If I can love a hundred million and one, I can love four women at the same time,” he said.

Duterte’s language confirmed his image as a political outsider. “It was something people could relate to,” Pia Ranada, a reporter at the news Web site Rappler, told me. She said that Duterte came across as “the father who would protect you but also the masa leader, the populist leader who will look after your interests, who cares for you because he’s one of you.”

On the campaign trail, Duterte typically wore a plaid shirt and jeans. On the rare occasions when he wore a barong, a formal embroidered shirt, he rolled up the sleeves. He spoke not in the English-Tagalog mixture of the capital but in a creole of English, Tagalog, and Bisaya known as Davao Tagalog. At the beginning of the campaign, he ushered Ranada and another journalist into his house in Davao and showed off the traditional tabò, or water dipper, that he used to bathe. His one extravagance was a large collection of shoes, which he joked was the only thing that he had in common with Imelda Marcos.

This was not quite true. Duterte took from the Marcos years an ability to play both sides of a messy conflict. Marcos, who died in 1989, in Honolulu, is still surprisingly popular in the Philippines; most of his loyalists never lost faith, and many younger Filipinos look back at the charismatic leader with a kind of secondhand nostalgia. During the campaign, Duterte courted Marcos loyalists assiduously, making it a priority to rebury Marcos in the national Heroes Cemetery. He reportedly considered Marcos’s son, a fifty-nine-year-old senator named Ferdinand (Bongbong) Marcos, Jr., as a running mate, and he praised the elder Marcos, saying that he would have been the Philippines’ best President, “if he did not become a dictator.”



Nicole Curato, a sociologist at the University of Canberra, was doing field work in the slums of Tacloban, a provincial capital in the central Philippines, and saw the excitement inspired by Duterte’s candidacy. “It was a very do-it-yourself campaign,” she said. To attract crowds to rallies, politicians typically rely on a strategy known as hakot, in which poor Filipinos are given a free meal, a couple of hundred pesos, and a campaign shirt, and are bused from the slums to the city plaza, where they cheer for the chosen candidate. But Curato said that Duterte’s supporters borrowed money to get to the plaza themselves. Duterte is perpetually late, which meant that supporters might be kept waiting in the sweltering heat for as long as seven hours. Yet it seemed not to bother them. “People were really crazy about him,” Ranada told me. “It’s the only word for it.”

Duterte relied on an army of volunteers to publicize his campaign on social media. The Philippines has among the highest rates of social-media use in the world, in large part because millions of Filipinos employed abroad use it to keep in touch with their families. Overseas workers were a crucial segment of Duterte’s supporters. Since they were spread out all over the world, they could post pro-Duterte messages on Facebook at all hours. One of Duterte’s most rabid supporters was a pop star and sex blogger named Mocha Uson, the leader of a girl group called the Mocha Girls. When Duterte was accused of sexism, she posted on Facebook an account of how, when the Mocha Girls came to Davao, he was always a gentleman, unlike most mayors, who tried to arrange liaisons with them.

Duterte won in a landslide, earning six million more votes than Mar Roxas. Many people saw his victory as a protest against the political élite’s continuing inability to address the country’s problems. Duterte’s predecessor, the reformist Benigno Aquino III, had some success addressing corruption and introduced some economic reforms, but Filipinos saw little change in their lives: they still endured hellish commutes on crumbling roads; they continued to be victimized by crime, corrupt police, and a broken justice system; and about a quarter of them still lived in poverty. If these were the fruits of liberal democracy, many thought, perhaps it was time to try something new. “It’s a repudiation of the past six years of a regime that claims to be after good governance, participatory democracy, but really it doesn’t deliver the goods,” Curato said.

In June, Duterte held a victory party at the Davao City Crocodile Park. In a speech in front of two hundred thousand supporters, he received the loudest applause when he addressed drug dealers. “You sons of bitches,” he said. “I will really kill you.”

During Duterte’s first hundred days in office, the drug war was carried out with a distinctly Filipino mixture of high drama, mass spectacle, and enigmatic violence. In early August, in a speech at a naval base, Duterte read out a list of more than a hundred and fifty politicians and police officers who he alleged were involved in the illegal drug trade, the first of a number of “narcolists” that he released in the following months. It was a tactic from his days as mayor, when he went on his weekly television show, Gikan Sa Masa, Para Sa Masa, and read lists of names of alleged criminals and drug dealers, many of whom ended up as victims of the D.D.S.

In Duterte’s first three months as President, the Philippine Daily Inquirer, which has been monitoring the killings, listed more than fourteen hundred drug users killed by police and vigilantes. Front pages were filled with photos of the bloodstained victims, bound and gagged with duct tape, who had been shot in the head or garrotted; cardboard signs around their necks served as a warning to others. In the slums of the big cities, police carried out Operation Tokhang, or “knock and plead,” visiting the homes of people who were suspected of involvement with drugs and urging them to turn themselves in. Government reports boasted that seven hundred thousand “drug personalities” surrendered in the first two months in mass ceremonies in malls, city plazas, and auditoriums. An administration official told me that the Guinness Book of World Records expressed interest in certifying it as the biggest mass surrender of criminals in history.

From Davao, Duterte brought with him Ronald (the Rock) dela Rosa, who had served as the city’s police chief, and made him head of the Philippine National Police. The federal police are notorious for corruption, and Duterte has promised to clean up the force, calling out “ninja” cops who resell drugs confiscated in busts. But he dismissed those killed by police as “drug-crazed” maniacs who had resisted arrest, and claimed that murders attributed to the vigilantes were the result of gang wars. In August, Dela Rosa announced that the campaign had already cut the crime rate in half. The killings have done little to diminish Duterte’s popularity. “It’s part of this narrative that killing has been normalized,” Curato, the sociologist, told me. “Before, it’s the state that turns a blind eye on it, and now a broader society is also willing to just turn a blind eye on the culture of violence.” Extrajudicial killing is common enough that there’s a slang term for it: “salvaging,” which, according to the writer Jose F. Lacuna, derives from the Tagalog salbahe, meaning “wild” or “savage.”

Not long after Duterte took office, the Philippine Commission on Human Rights started a task force to investigate the extrajudicial killings. Chito Gascon, the head of the C.H.R., has warned Duterte that he risks prosecution by the International Criminal Court if he fails to halt them. In September, I met with the leader of the task force, Gwen Pimentel-Gana, at her office. Above her desk hangs a portrait of her father, Aquilino Pimentel, Jr., a Senator who was imprisoned by the Marcos regime.

Pimentel-Gana told me that in the first sixty days of the Duterte administration the commission opened more than two hundred investigations into extrajudicial killings, slightly less than half as many as were opened during the entire six years of the Aquino administration. “We now will have to tell the government,” she said, “in your fight against crime or in your fight against drugs, do not forget that lives of people are sacred.”

When I asked her whether Duterte’s rhetoric was encouraging the killings, she was equivocal: “It’s so difficult sometimes to try to interpret what he’s saying, because one time he says, ‘I’m not for human rights.’ The next time he says, ‘All those who are abusing their authority will be punished.’ ” I asked her about the difference between her tone and that of Human Rights Watch, which has declared the drug war a “human-rights calamity.” She replied brusquely. “I will talk like a Filipino, O.K.?” she said. “An ordinary worker—he goes home every night and, for the first time, when he passes through the narrow streets of his home in a shanty or what, he does not see any more drunkards or people smoking on the streets or children running around and being just left there, abandoned. He sees clean streets, peaceful at night. What would you say?”

Yet an overwhelming number of those killed in Duterte’s drug war have been poor. When asked recently about criticism from anti-poverty groups, Duterte explained that poor people are easier targets. Rich people do drugs on private jets, and “I cannot afford the fighter planes,” he said. Jose Manuel Diokno, a human-rights lawyer, told me, “Those who have a name or have some influence or hold some position who are implicated in the drug trade are given an investigation, they’re given due process. But poorer people whose names appear on the list are just simply killed.” Diokno is the dean of the law school at De La Salle University, in Manila, and the head of the Free Legal Assistance Group, founded by his father during the Marcos era to provide legal assistance to victims of martial law; his father was an opposition senator who was imprisoned for two years without charge.

We spoke on the forty-fourth anniversary of the declaration of martial law. Diokno was preparing to lead a candlelight vigil that evening. He said of that period, “A small segment of the population were branded as Communists. They were depicted as people who are godless, who have no regard for human life. The reasoning then was, since they are like that, then they are not human.” He continued, “Instead of being branded a Communist today, you’re branded a drug user or a drug addict or a drug pusher.”

As you probably already know, Duterte hates Obama. Not so, Trump. He says he can get along just fine with the President-elect. After all, they have an awful lot in common. And Duterte is giddy that Trump isn't going to be lecturing any other authoritarians about human rights. As for deporting Flipinos in the U.S.-- whose remittances account for 3% of his country's GDP-- Duterte seems to think Trump will be fair-minded about how he does that. Tuesday he told reporters that Trump's win was "a well-deserved victory... I trust in his judgment that he would be fair in the matter of the treatment of illegal immigrants. I cannot talk for the illegals because, whether President Trump or anybody else for that matter, an illegal is always an illegal.

Duterte’s volatility and willingness to castigate anyone he disagrees with earned him the nickname “Trump of the East” when he was campaigning as the alternative candidate in a presidential election he won in May by a big margin.

His warm words for Trump contrasts starkly with the abuse he poured on incumbent Barack Obama, who he told repeatedly to “go to hell” and called a “son of a bitch” for daring to voice concern about the death toll in Duterte’s drugs war.

Wanna watch some real stupid? Take a look-- you'll be seeing years of this kind of clueless crap: