The Americans have never had a ruder and unlikelier awakener than Donald Trump: he has done it with antithetical values – he is sexist, homophobic, and xenophobic. And he is taking over as their president this New Year.
The Philippines has its own Donald Trump, Rodrigo Duterte, an unlikely awakener himself. In fact, Duterte's assumption precedes Trump's, by 6 months, and he is proving very rude indeed – and worse. (WATCH: Duterte: The Wartime President)
But first, Trump.
As president of the self-proclaimed greatest nation on earth, a claim he disputes but has promised to make good during his four-year watch, Trump intends to reexamine its political and economic paradigms and presumptions.
Perhaps the last sleep from which the Americans awoke afraid and sweaty in any comparable way was the Vietnam war – the 9/11 attacks by Arab terrorists crashing hijacked US airliners into New York's Twin Towers may have itself caused a great shock, but not one as deep or fundamental as Trump's election, which has struck at America's very psche and culture.
The US had done well with its postwar policy of containment toward communist Russia and China until it was drawn in the late 1950s into the Vietnam conflict, which was to end in its defeat in 1975 and the surrender of its South Vietnamese client to the northern-based communist regime.
Meanwhile in the Middle East, the age-old row between the Americans' traditional partners, the Israelis, and the Arabs had broken out into a full-blown war. And, during years of confusion, frustrations, and political realignments among the Arabs following an Israeli victory, they ended up shooting at each other in sectarian and civil conflicts, and the Americans finding themselves taking unfamiliar sides. That is precisely the one foreign-policy posture Trump is reconsidering. In fact his rhetoric betrays a swing toward the opposite extreme – isolationism.
He has framed his campaign outside global engagements, and largely owes his victory to voters who rue investments being lost to countries where it is cheaper to operate, and jobs lost to both foreign and immigrant workers.
Like Trump, Duterte rode to the presidency on a populist vote, and has his own deviant tendencies. In fact, he identifies with Trump and hopes to hit it off with him, although, with his isolationist bent, there's no telling where the Philippines would land in his hierarchy of concerns.
Duterte is sexist and homophobic, too. But the tendency that has defined his presidency, only on its 7th month in the New Year, is authoritarianism, a tendency to operate not just outside the norms of civility – not even US President Barrack Obama or United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki Moon or Pope Francis have been spared his cussing – but outside the rule of law.
He has been roundly warned about that by local and foreign watchers in regard to his war on drugs. That war has claimed the lives of over 6,000 drug dealers and addicts, some of whom were mistaken targets and others victims of vigilante summary executions. But Duterte cares nothing of critics; he once even declared, "Nobody tells me."
His authoritarian streak betrays itself in both rhetoric and predisposition. He put the whole country under a "state of lawlessness" when two bombs exploded in a night market in his native southern city of Davao in September, killing 14 people and wounding 70 others. The suspects in the bombing have long been in custody, but the emergency, which gives him the power to deploy the police and the army anywhere anytime, remains in effect.
And, with no new extraordinary threats to peace and order to justify arrests without warrants, he has yet threatened to suspend the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus. He has also asked Congress to amend the constitution and do away with the legislative and judicial checks on martial law, itself predicated on rebellion or invasion, neither of which is a present threat; the amendment will not only give the president the unilateral decision to impose it but allow him to go on ruling as a dictator indefinitely, as did his professed idol Ferdinand Marcos. – Rappler.com