An old, tired playbook

An old, tired playbook | Daily Tribune

Malacañang’s reaction to Zaldy Co’s allegations was to call it a “comedy series,” dismiss the details and paint the exposé as the handiwork of a man running out of road.

Presidential apologist Claire Castro’s insistence that there is “no evidence, just a script” does not actually answer anything. It is a crude attempt to downgrade the conversation from corruption involving billions to tone, editing and props. It’s a strategy designed to make the public debate superficialities rather than substance.

The suitcases Co showed?

“Just suitcases.”

A clever-sounding dodge, until one asks the more urgent question: why is the Palace nitpicking about luggage rather than responding to Co’s central and explicit charge that President Marcos himself received P25 billion in kickbacks from the Floodgate scandal?

But the argument Castro saved for her crescendo is the one that deserves the most scrutiny.

According to her, the President could not possibly be involved because it was he who ordered the investigation. It was delivered full of confidence, but it was the brittle sort, the kind that fractures on contact.

Machiavelli, writing five centuries ago, understood this political maneuver better than anyone. In The Prince, he urged rulers facing suspicion to appear active and morally upright, especially when they were not.

The appearance of action, the philosopher argued, often works better than action itself. Creating the illusion of initiative is a ruler’s most essential defense.

Sun Tzu, writing even earlier, warned that leaders under threat must create motion to hide weakness. Announce something, launch something and rearrange something. It does not matter what happens, only that it looks like the leader is still in command.

History provides an even starker lesson.

In 1934, Hitler ordered an “investigation” into alleged treason within the Sturmabteilung (the Storm Detachment or Brownshirts), his original paramilitary force notorious for street violence. Led by Ernst Röhm, the Brownshirts had become politically inconvenient.

The so-called investigation directed by Hitler was never meant to find the truth. It served only to justify the Night of the Long Knives, the purge that eliminated Röhm and much of the SA leadership. Hitler then declared they had been “investigated and found traitorous,” using his own staged inquiry as justification.

That bloodbath remains one of history’s clearest examples of a leader weaponizing an investigation not for accountability, but for self-preservation.

This is why Castro’s reasoning disintegrates once given a moment’s scrutiny. Declaring innocence on the grounds of having ordered an investigation is like claiming a man is not a killer because he had dialed 911. Many murderers have done precisely that, summoning the police while pretending to be horrified by the corpses.

Wrongdoing of this scale does not sprout from mid-level bureaucrats. It flows from the summit. Billions do not enter, exit, and reenter the national budget without the blessing, or direct orchestration, of someone powerful.

Which brings us to today’s twin political earthquakes: the resignations of Executive Secretary Lucas Bersamin and Budget Secretary Amenah Pangandaman.

These are not minor bureaucrats quietly stepping aside. These are the President’s closest operators — Bersamin, the “Little President” and Pangandaman, the custodian of the nation’s purse.

Two of the highest officials of government resigning is a serious blow to the administration, and perhaps, just perhaps, the clearest sign yet of a government imploding.