The View From Taft
By Philip Ella Juico
Donald Trump and Ninoy Aquino
Republican Donald J. Trump blamed on Tuesday “both sides” for the violence that had occurred during a white supremacist rally on Aug. 12, in Charlottesville, Virginia. His remark drew widespread condemnation from almost all sectors, including some Republicans and sober leaders worldwide.
In February 1986, a few days after the violence-ridden, fraud-tainted snap presidential elections called by Ferdinand Marcos at the behest of the Ronald Reagan administration, Republican Reagan made a startling announcement on TV on the elections monitored by international election watchdogs. On the advice of Paul Manafort, a paid publicist of Marcos, Reagan had the gall to make a statement from the White House that “cheating occurred on both sides.” Note how both Republicans tried to justify the violence by blaming “both sides.”
Manafort was commissioned by the Marcoses to help in the dictator’s losing campaign in the snap presidential elections despite Marcos’s guns, goons, and gold. Those snap presidential elections were called by an ailing Marcos after the US had seen the dictator losing grip on the country which he had ruled with an iron fist through martial law starting in September 1972. Manafort is the same shadowy fellow whose house was recently raided by FBI agents in search of evidence of Russian meddling in the US presidential elections.
The comments of both Republicans are so eerily similar that one cannot help but think that, perhaps, Republicans will generally not come with up with definitive and unequivocal statements condemning evil. It appears that, especially on the issue of racism, Republicans have lost sight of their core ideals, which had their beginnings with Abraham Lincoln, who had condemned slavery.
Although some Republicans did come out strongly to decry Trump’s remarks, which obviously show Trump’s own (im)moral position and played to the coalition of racists, white supremacists, neo-Nazis and David Duke-type Ku Klux Klan sympathizers who had supported his bid for the White House, the Republican party will surely pay the price for Trump’s irrational behavior in the mid-term elections in 2018.
All throughout his life, Trump has never been known as an advocate of social justice and civil rights. He had always been the brash businessman whose businesses were fuelled by hype and his unconventional style of campaigning and governance that appealed to the disaffected and left-out of America’s strong economic development during Barack Obama’s presidency. As an American educator once told me, the ones who were disaffected and left out were the same people who were mostly unwilling to get a good education and instead blamed immigrants, who crowded them out of the job market; technology, which they could not appreciate because of lack of education; and overseas companies for their superior ways of doing business.
Listening to Trump, whose father, based on an unattributed photograph, is shown in the middle of a 1927 Ku Klux Klan rally (whether as a bystander or a participant, no one can tell) triggers in me the same anger that Reagan created when he said that “cheating occurred on both sides.”
The snap presidential elections had its origins in the successful anti-Marcos movement, which started right after his declaration of martial law in 1972 but reached fever pitch when his main rival, former senator Benigno (Ninoy) Aquino, Jr., was executed on Aug. 21, 1983. The assassination, which I would rather call an execution, occurred despite the security blanket that enveloped the then Manila International Airport supposedly to protect the returning charismatic opposition leader.
So, as we decry the indecisiveness, evasiveness, and lack of moral moorings of both Trump (and his lack of basic human decency and respect for civil rights and the law) and Reagan, and of advisers like Manafort and Steve Bannon on the Charlottesville and snap elections issues, we remember Ninoy Aquino, who made a decisive statement by dying for the Filipino.
Three days ago, we observed the 34th anniversary of the execution of Ninoy.
For those of us who were around when Marcos declared martial law, when Ninoy was executed, when Corazon Aquino rose to power, and when Marcos fled the country, Trump’s insensitive remarks (which had some important sectors of corporate America abandoning him) revive memories of Marcos’s crony, Reagan. And the entry of Reagan into the picture serves as a reminder of how the Teflon President almost ensured the continued abusive rule of Marcos had it not been for pressure to drop Marcos emanating from all sources, including the decent Republican party members.
If anything positive has resulted from this latest evidence of Trump’s unsuitability for the presidency of the most powerful nation, it is making the struggle of forgetting Ninoy Aquno’s sacrifice less formidable. Our youth, who do not remember much of Ninoy Aquino and EDSA, should note how Trump offers an example of everything that Ninoy Aquino wasn’t.
Dr. Philip Ella Juico teaches Strategic Management and Sustainable Business in the MBA and DBA programs, respectively, of the Ramon V. Del Rosario College of Business of De La Salle University. He was Secretary of Agrarian Reform during the administration of President Corazon C. Aquino, and Chairman of the Philippine Sports Commission under President Fidel V. Ramos.
