With Donald Trump as the incoming President of the United States, there is one simple question Filipinos should be asking: What’s in it for us?
My friend in Manila sent me a text message last Wednesday saying, “Tito Lito, you were right, Trump na ito!” At the time, it was clear that all Trump needed was to inch out Hillary in two states and the battle was won. Towards noon our time, it was all over.
America and most of the world were suddenly discombobulated. Western media, CNN particularly, was in shock, in a state of denial. The New York Times, Nate Silver, the Huffington Post, the pollsters were proven wrong—they didn’t see it coming.
To be sure, my friend who complimented me about being right on Trump didn’t know that there were moments I myself doubted Clinton could lose. Three weeks before, in the aftermath of the video clip where Donald was caught bragging about how he fondled women, I thought it was over for the Manhattan billionaire.
This was America where women could get really offended by such sexist remarks.
Even Speaker Paul Ryan had begun to distance himself from his party’s nominee.
But like the bouncing ball, Trump got over it, and when Hillary’s e-mail problems were resuscitated by the FBI, it evened the outcome once more.
Remember the Duterte campaign? How we all fretted when that Australian rape joke happened? Victory was already within grasp, in fact, quite imminent as far as we figured when in a moment of extreme candor in the wee hours of the morning, candidate Duterte recalled the story of the hostage victim when he was a young mayor.
Everyone and his mother jumped in for the “kill” on our candidate, and we were admittedly nervous. So we took a Metro Manila dipstick the week after the remarks were made public. It was just three weeks before Election Day, and the poll numbers dipped by only two points. Even that uncalled-for remark from US Ambassador Philip Goldberg didn’t harm our candidate mortally.
But in the Duterte campaign,
the numbers were not as close. He had trumped Grace, and Binay was sinking. Mar was gaining on account of Poe’s woes, but there was very little time left for him to catch up on Duterte’s speeding train. We had the momentum, the wind beneath our wings, and the competition was just waddling.
In Trump versus Clinton, it was a cliffhanger down the wire. And yet if one believed the pollsters and the rather unfathomable way the American electoral system worked, it seemed like there was no way Trump could get the 270 magic electoral vote number. But deep inside, I knew there was something in the American psyche that the pollsters couldn’t adequately plumb. Like in the Philippines, there was a pent-up frustration at a system that did not seem to work.
Obama promised change, but after eight years, the change wasn’t as palpable as people thought it would be. Plus ca change, plus ca reste la meme chose.
Just as in the Philippines, the poor and the lower middle class, whose numbers were legion, have waited patiently for decades since Edsa Uno for always-promised reforms that never materialized, never uplifted them from their daily misery. What’s in it for us, they asked, and the answer was nada. Duterte did well in Davao, and his message of change seemed real, if raw.
In America, the numbers of the disenchanted weren’t as many, but they were enough to make Trump sneak a win against the lady who mouthed the same platitudes, the same promises Obama said eight years before that mesmerized the electorate to vote for its first African-American president.
I haven’t stepped foot on the US of A for the last ten years, but keeping in touch through the internet, just as many Filipinos do, I sensed that just as a belittled Duterte would sweep the race here, a Trump would well…trump the establishment candidate.
Now we, and the rest of the world can just sit and wait…vamos a ver. Let us see how Trump will perform.
President Duterte seems to be hitting the right notes in what he is doing, and saying, never mind the discomfiture of many. He offended Obama, he sashayed into the anxious embrace of Xi Jinping, he wowed Abe. Did he know deep inside that Donald would make it?
Why, he even named my friend Joey Antonio special envoy to Washington. And our local real estate developer had used the Trump name to brand some of his high-end towers.
Of course Duterte also named another friend, Babes Romualdez as special envoy when they were in Tokyo. Babes had a hotline to the US Embassy, which bet heavily on a continuation of the Obama era into another first in US political history, a woman president.
In a sense, the wily Duterte bet on both American horses.
There are many who feel a Trump win will bring back a protectionist America, that business process outsourcing would soon end, leaving many BPO workers unemployed. And that he would soon send back our immigrants to the land of milk and honey.
Calm yourselves. The business sense that made the guy a billionaire several times over will prevail. And that business sense will tell him to go slow on campaign promises that did not make real sense. For as long as Filipinos speak better English than their counterparts in Bangalore and for as long as we do not demand highly uncompetitive wages, those BPO companies will remain here. The trick is in always being “competitive.”
As for the illegal immigrants, the TNT in America…well, that Trump can, and will do, that is, expel them. There will be a lot of teeth gnashing, but what’s illegal is illegal. There would likely be a tightening of immigrant entry, so the long wait of relatives of green card holders might be longer.
As for US-RP-PROC relationships in the South China sea, the businessman would likely prevail. That should keep Xi Jinping smiling. Trump will look at the bottom line in the “pivot to Asia,” and check the cost-benefit ratios.
Yes, as the song goes, “what is the whole world coming to?”
It has changed. It is changing.