The Devil’s finest trick

THE controversial 19th-century French poet Baudelaire wrote: “The Devil’s finest trick is to persuade us he doesn’t exist.” In today’s politics, the finest trick has been the portrayal by the Marcos regime that the president had nothing to do with Sherwin Gatchalian becoming Senate president, that he was chosen by a majority of the senators, who saw him as the best man to lead the chamber.

Tell that to the Marines. It is so obvious that it was Marcos who placed Gatchalian in that post. Marcos lost control of the Senate last May 11 when the independent bloc headed by Sen. Alan Peter Cayetano with a 13-man majority kicked out his man, Sen. Tito Sotto.

Marcos scrambled and first got the International Criminal Court to issue a warrant of arrest on Sen. Ronald de la Rosa, reportedly through the lobbying of suspected communist cadre Kristina Conti, who managed to be appointed as “assistant to counsel” in the ICC. After casting his vote to elect Cayetano to head the Senate, de la Rosa was forced to go into hiding to avoid an alleged warrant of arrest from a foreign court, with the National Bureau of Investigation sending over a hundred of its armed-to-the-teeth personnel to the Senate to arrest him. The willy de la Rosa outsmarted them and escaped the dragnet, although he can’t attend the Senate sessions anymore.

Second, an arrest warrant was issued on June 23 against Sen. Jinggoy Estrada, on a corruption charge that was later elevated to plunder, which prevents him from posting bail.

This brought down the Cayetano bloc’s numbers from 13 to 12 who could attend Senate sessions. When Sen. Chiz Escudero defected to the Malacañang cabal — allegedly after he was threatened that his celebrity wife Heart would be included in the graft charges — both blocs had the same 11 senator members.

Intimidation

According to Cayetano, Sen. Joel Villanueva was then subjected to the same kind of intimidation, that he would meet the same fate as Jinggoy if he didn’t defect to the Marcos bloc. And so Villanueva did, finally swelling the Marcos bloc’s ranks to 13, enabling the forming of a quorum to elect the Senate president and other officers who would be happy to do Marcos’ bidding. Neither Escudero nor Villanueva has denied the reports that they had been threatened by the Palace.

It was the intimidation of his colleagues that allowed Gatchalian to become Senate president. Such intimidation quite obviously could have come only from the Palace, which has tight control over the Ombudsman’s Office and the Justice Department. With about 2,000 lawyers handling some 150,000 complaints and cases in court, it is easy for these two agencies’ heads to focus their resources on specific targets, in this case the independent senators.

Insensitive to his colleagues’ intimidation, Gatchalian shamelessly called the struggle between the two rival blocs in the Senate as “Senate-flix,” implying it was just entertainment like the movies in the Netflix streaming service. He should have been man enough to say that it was Marcos who had staged the “entertainment” with two senators forced to abandon their principles to escape jail.

Marcos again demonstrated his tight hold of mainstream media by disseminating the false narrative that it was a mere contest between two factions in the Senate. A columnist in this paper who shamelessly draws a salary from a government propaganda entity wrote that Escudero “ended the paralysis that gripped the Senate” and demonstrated “an act of courage.” What planet does this columnist live on? Isn’t he aware that Escudero’s — and Villanueva’s — very noticeable forlorn comportment when they joined the Gatchalian bloc pointed to the fact that they were intimidated to defect to the Marcos group?

Legitimate

Most of the commentariat and broadcast media have now fallen for the Devil’s trick — or pretend to. They blurt out the one that since the Marcos minions have cobbled together a numerical majority, Gatchalian is the “legitimate” Senate president, as if legality automatically conferred moral authority in a chamber captured by fear and patronage.

Only a moronic media, or a paid one, would not question the script of an unassuming, nerdy Gatchalian suddenly rallying 13 senators to elect him as president. Indeed, Gatchalian is only a notch above the chamber’s two most middling members — Lito Lapid and JV Ejercito — as being too mediocre to ever head the Senate.

Those who became Senate president were senators who proved themselves to be primus inter pares in different ways. All first served as majority leader, minority leader, Senate president pro tempore, or had already established themselves as national political heavyweights — men like Jovito Salonga, Franklin Drilon, Juan Ponce Enrile, Tito Sotto, and even Alan Peter Cayetano, who all came to the post with years of chamber leadership or major Cabinet and House experience behind them. Gatchalian is a glaring exception.

Gatchalian has never been considered in his 10 years as senator to be Senate presidential timber. He is not an orator who can sway a chamber. He is not an elder statesman with moral capital built over decades. His brand has been that of a competent committee man — especially in finance because he was the CEO of his family’s business conglomerate — useful, diligent, but hardly a figure other senators would rally around as their primus inter pares.

His chairmanship of the energy committee even left a bad taste among colleagues. Together with Risa Hontiveros, he waged a noisy campaign from 2020 to 2022 to block the sale of Chevron’s 45‑percent Malampaya stake to Dennis Uy’s Udenna group, branding the DOE’s approval “defective” and “invalid,” warning that Uy’s shell companies had neither the money nor the technical capacity to run a gas field.

Zeal

On the surface, it sounded like reformist zeal; in the corridors, many senators, especially the veterans who had seen similar mercenary campaigns by legislators before, muttered that what was really at stake was which tycoon — not whether any tycoon at all — would control Malampaya, with another conglomerate waiting in the wings had the Chevron deal been torpedoed. It was also seen as an exercise in pettiness, especially on the part of Hontiveros, to get back at former president Rodrigo Duterte, who was the Davao-based Uy’s friend.

Gatchalian and Hontiveros showed their vicious side in this episode. After the Energy Department refused to rescind the Chevron deal on grounds that it was a private deal and the DOE had no authority to do so, they pushed the Senate to ask the Ombudsman to file graft cases against Alfonso Cusi, the energy secretary, and four other officials. As usual in so many Ombudsman cases, these are still pending six years after.

Marcos actually had no more senator left to put up as a candidate for Senate president. Sotto had just been ousted by 13 senators. Many senators, on the other hand, have started to voice suspicions on why the new Senate building Sen. Panfilo Lacson had arduously pushed for is now rumored to cost P40 billion when it is finally ready to occupy, 10 times the P4 billion he said it would cost seven years ago. Marcos already tried using Zubiri, but he proved not to be a good puppet, as he didn’t cooperate with the regime’s people’s initiative plot to amend the Constitution, and he allowed the PDEA leaks probe that linked Marcos himself to illegal drugs use.

Marcos, of course, could not trust any of the three Yellow senators — Pangilinan, Aquino and Hontiveros — to head the Senate even as he has led them by the nose because of the 2025 decision by the Court of Appeals ordering the agrarian reform department to pay the Cojuangco clan — the Yellows’ business core — P29 billion as payment for putting Hacienda Luisita under agrarian reform, 62 times the P471 million court-ordered award in 2015. (I have written details of this development in my June 23, 2025 column “Under Marcos 2 admin, a colossal P29 billion to be given to Cojuangcos.” The Tulfo brothers, of course, are too much new to the Senate.

Marcos

In short, Marcos was left with no other senator to install as Senate head, except for Gatchalian, who had been so low-key that most people didn’t know that he was the right-hand man of the controversial billionaire Chinese Filipino William Gatchalian.

And the need for a Marcos puppet was crucial at this time when there is an outcry to investigate the accusations of 18 ex-soldiers that they delivered hundreds of millions in flood-control kickbacks not only to Marcos allies but also to the president himself and his family, and when the impeachment trial of his arch-enemy Sara Duterte, a shoo-in for the presidency in 2028, will be starting.

Gatchalian did not become Senate president because his colleagues suddenly discovered in him a brilliant Churchillian statesman, heretofore hidden. He became Senate president because he was the only senator available for Marcos’ need to control the chamber. Moreover, he is a more pliable puppet, as the fate of his family’s conglomerate is at the president’s hands, involving at least three controversial cases, which I narrated in detail in past columns last week: payment of the P1.3 billion owed to the government, originally borrowed from ousted President Joseph Estrada’s illegal “Jose Velarde” account; the go-ahead by President Marcos for the Gatchalians’ P34-billion Manila Bay reclamation project; and the P1.3 billion settlement by the Gatchalian conglomerate of its 2000 loan from the Social Security System.

Marcos’ diabolical genius in this operation lies in his narrative that it was a struggle between two factions in the Senate and that he wasn’t interfering in it, never mind the arrests and arrest threats against the independent bloc’s members on graft charges.

It’s a Devil’s fine trick indeed when he declared: “Majority trusted Win.” The reality is that he has turned the Senate into an annex of the executive branch, headed by a proxy whose family’s survival is contingent on the president’s goodwill. Marcos Jr. is doing what his father did 54 years ago, albeit on a lesser scale this time around, and quieter. This is one way a democracy dies, not with a bang but a whimper, helped by a shameless, servile media.

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The Devil’s finest trick
Source: Breaking News PH