Wenceslao: The Trillanes issue

THAT we have a very factionalized setup is shown by people’s perception of the maverick Sen. Antonio Trillanes IV. It’s like flipping a coin. For Duterte critics, Trillanes brave stance against an administration led by “strongman” President Rodrigo Duterte is admirable. The reverse is true for Duterte administration supporters, more so the so-called Dutertards. For them Trillanes is a fool, even the devil incarnate. There’s no middle ground there.

There used to be two of them in the current Senate, the other being Sen. Leila de Lima. But the Duterte administration succeeded early on to push her to the periphery (translation: jail) after drugs-related cases were filed against her. But first de Lima’s attempt to investigate incidents of extrajudicial killings (EJKs) during the early stage of the government’s war against illegal drugs (that branched into a probe into the EJKS when Duterte was Davao City mayor) had the Senate majority strip her of her committee chairmanships.

Now it is Trillanes acting like Don Quixote tilting at the windmill. He dared to accuse the president, whose popularity rating has remained high and who has a supermajority in both chambers of Congress, of possessing ill-gotten wealth. Now he is focusing on the President’s son, Davao City Vice Mayor Paolo Duterte, whom he accused in yesterday’s hearing at the Senate Blue ribbon Committee that tackled the smuggling of P6.4 billion of illegal drugs of being possibly a member of a “triad.”

What Trillanes, and also de Lima before him, has been doing recently can be described as an adventurism on the level of the coup attempt he and former renegade Magdalo soldiers launched against the administration of former president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. The problem is that he seems to be doing it now by his lonesome considering that his fellow opposition senators are continuing to calibrate their responses to the issues hounding the administration.

He thus seems to be right for the picking. Like in de Lima’s case, the president has taken the lead in answering Trillanes’s tirades. That should be enough signal for the Senate majority who will decide on his fate after Sen. Richard Gordon, the most avid defender of the president in the Senate, filed an ethics complaint against him. I think that if push comes to shove, the Senate majority will end up “punishing” Trillanes. He may either be suspended or expelled from the Senate.

But we are in a situation slightly different from the one prevailing when accusations of shenanigans were first hurled against de Lima. While the President is still scoring high in popularity ratings in surveys, the perception of his administration, especially on the war against drugs is starting to change. The killings of minors Kian de los Santos, Carl Angelo Arnaiz and Reynaldo de Guzman have shown a different picture of that “war.”

The Duterte administration may not admit it, but the killings that has characterized its war on drugs have started to weigh down on its governance. That is obviously the reason why Malacañang has announced yesterday a review of the conduct of such a war. This situation is different from the one prevailing in the early months of the Duterte presidency.

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