IF you’re looking for a similarity between new U.S. President Donald Trump and President Rodrigo Duterte, it is the fact that when they say something, it’s difficult to tell what they really mean.
Communications Secretary Martin Andanar is at his wit’s end trying to explain to a sensation-prone Philippine media that the blustery things that come out of Duterte’s mouth should not be taken literally. According to Andanar, when Duterte says he is thinking of unilaterally declaring martial law, he really doesn’t mean it and the media should not misinterpret him.
“The President has categorically said no to martial law. He even made a pronouncement saying that martial law did not improve the lives of the Filipinos.” And Andanar added: “We therefore decry the latest misreporting that the President will declare martial law simply ‘if he wants to’ or that ‘no one can stop the President from declaring martial law. Such headlines sow panic and confusion to many. We consider this kind of reportage as the height of journalistic irresponsibility.”
The trouble is that Duterte did say that if he wants to declare martial law, he would do so over any objections of the co-equal branches of government, the Legislature and the Supreme Court.
Wasn’t that “the height of presidential irresponsibility”?
Presidential Spokesman Ernesto Abella, on the other hand, appealed to the media and the public to “use creative imagination” to interpret Duterte’s statements. Abella gave, as an example, Duterte’s threat to “cut ties” with the United States which “should not be taken literally.”
Said Abella, “Dapat intindihin natin yung word na ‘cut ng ties.’ (We should try to understand the word “cut ties”) It’s a possibility that he could, that he might… Let’s try to use our creative imagination. ‘Wag tayo masyadong literal (Let’s not be too literal).”
Abella’s explanation is reminiscent of the lyrics of a Harry Belafonte song, “It was clear as mud and it covered the ground and the confusion made my head go ‘round.”
Abella went on: “He carefully calibrates his statements so along that line, if we follow his style… Let us not simply just put a period at the end of his statements. Let’s wait for his clarifications regarding the matter.”
Abella explained that what Duterte really meant to say was that he wants to pursue “an independent foreign policy that is not exclusive or bound to one treaty.”
Couldn’t Duterte have simply put it that way? “I want you to know that the Philippines, as a sovereign nation, will pursue an independent foreign policy that is not exclusively tied to a country like the United States.”
But then, that would not have sounded dramatic enough and Duterte would have failed to impress his adoring supporters as being “macho,” “matapang” (fearless) and “matinik” (sharp).
Taken in that context, we are supposed to understand that when he vowed to resign from the presidency if he did not solve the drug problem in six months, and when he threatened to ride a jet ski to the Spratlys to confront the Chinese, he was simply trying to impress his adoring fans.
Fair enough? Well, okay, if Duterte truly doesn’t mean every word he says, why is it that when he threatened the wholesale slaughter of suspected drug lords, pushers and users, the Philippine National Police and the vigilantes did exactly that?
Has Duterte been misinterpreted and misunderstood?
And now comes, the 45th President of the United States, Donald Trump, with a penchant for what he has described as “truthful hyperbole.” According to the dictionary, a hyperbole is “an extravagant statement or figure of speech not intended to be taken literally.”
Political analyst Charlie Cook wrote, shortly after Trump was elected President: “At least half of Washington and plenty of people beyond the Beltway are taking a crash course in Donald Trump, trying to understand the most unconventional President-elect this country has ever seen.” Cook cited an article in The Atlantic that noted that ‘the press takes him (Trump) literally, but not seriously, his supporters take him seriously but not literally.’”
Cook noted that in Trump’s book, “The Art of the Deal,” Washington Post writer, Carlos Lozada, “was struck by something that Trump described as ‘truthful hyperbole.’ Then 41, the real estate developer wrote, ‘The final key to the way I promote is bravado. I play to people’s fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration – and a very effective form of promotion,’”
In actual practice, the exaggerations are neither “innocent” nor “little” but are more accurately described by writer Marta Cooper as “Donald Trump’s great, tremendous, unbelievable penchant for hyperbole.”
Almost sounding like Presidential Spokesman Abella, Cook hypothesized, “When Donald Trump says he wants to build a huge wall, the media and his critics seem to think he is imagining something like the Great Wall of China stretching from Tijuana to Brownsville. But Trump’s supporters interpret his words differently. They hear him saying that he’s going to take a hard line approach to border security and illegal immigration. He’s not going to mess around. So when his supporters hear him walking it back a bit – for instance, saying it could be a fence not a wall at places – they knew what he meant all along. They understood he was speaking figuratively about the wall.
“When he talks about ripping up trade deals, he’s not saying that he is going to shred the 741-page North American Free Trade Agreement and 348 pages of annexes. His supporters take him to mean that he is going to take a much tougher approach to NAFTA and other trade deals, that he is going to enforce trade agreements much more rigorously, and that the U.S. wasn’t going to be a chump any longer.”
And yet, one of Trump’s very first executive actions was to withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The TPP is important to a number of Southeast Asian countries, like Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam, as well as the Philippines which has been seriously considering signing up, given Constitutional limitations.
The partnership would make it easier and cheaper for them to trade with much larger economies, such as the U.S., because of the lowering of tariffs. But Trump has characterized the TPP as “a rape of the U.S. economy.”
In other words, Trump isn’t all bluff. But then, which part of what he says is bluff? And which part of what the Trump administration declares is the truth and which is “an alternative fact”?
By the way, “alternative fact” is the latest in the growing lexicon of things said but not meant, and things meant but said some other way – the new paradigm in the Duterte and Trump governments.
This term was blurted out by Trump’s senior aide, Kellyanne Conway in a televised exchange with NBC’s Chuck Todd over the number of people who lined the streets and occupied the Washington DC Mall for the Trump inauguration. Media showed aerial shots and street shots depicting empty spaces and unoccupied bleachers, and compared that to the huge crowd during President Barack Obama’s inauguration.
On his first press conference, Trump’s Press Secretary Sean Spicer castigated the media for “misleading the public” about the comparative sizes of the inaugural crowd – but photographs do not lie which, in effect, made Spicer a liar.
To this, Conway declared that Spicer was not lying but was merely presenting “alternative facts.” Todd’s rebuttal: “Look, alternative facts are not facts, They’re falsehoods.”
At any rate, I can hardly wait to see Duterte and Trump finally meeting each other in person, both equipped with the talent for bluster, hyperbole and alternative facts.
Says one pundit, “It could be a more interesting bolahan than a Warriors-Cavaliers basketball game.” ([email protected])
