Vice President Sara Duterte’s impeachment trial is underway, opening this week under conditions that already answer many questions being asked about the Senate’s fairness.

“Fair” and “clean” are two different matters, and the trial’s opening week seems to have already muddied both.

Duterte ally, Senator Rodante Marcoleta, was arrested on plunder charges hours before the trial began, following the earlier arrest and 90-day suspension of Senator Jinggoy Estrada on similar grounds.

A third pro-Duterte senator, Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa, has been in hiding since the ICC issued a warrant for his arrest over drug war killings during the administration of the Vice President’s father, former president Rodrigo Duterte.

Whatever the merits of those individual cases, their timing was not something the Vice President’s camp invented for sympathy — they are facts that will feed the narrative of a selective prosecution regardless of how the evidence in the articles of impeachment play out.

That is the trap Philippine institutions have built for themselves: even a scrupulously fair verdict will be read by half the country as rigged, because the process around it looks stacked before a single witness is cross-examined.

Sara Duterte did not attend the opening session and is being represented by lead counsel Sheila Sison, who has argued that appearing through lawyers does not mean a lack of transparency.

Duterte cannot be compelled to attend her own trial, as she retains the right against self-incrimination. Legally, that’s sound.

Politically, it is a gamble—absence protects her from live cross-examination but concedes the daily news cycle to the prosecutors laying out the allegations of an assassination plot against President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., First Lady Liza Araneta-Marcos, and former Speaker Martin Romualdez.

Silence reads as strategy to her base and as evasion to everyone else. Both readings are fixed; nothing she does will change them.

The stakes in this trial are real, but anyone suggesting that a “crisis” scenario would follow the Vice President’s defeat in impeachment court deserves more caution than the rhetoric around it suggests.

Duterte remains the frontrunner for 2028, with a late May survey showing 51 percent of respondents intending to vote for her. A conviction would permanently bar her from elected office — a result that would not simply deflate that number but erase her candidacy entirely, and test whether her movement would transfer to another Duterte or collapse without her.

That is genuinely destabilizing, and the thousands of police deployed and hundreds of protesters gathered outside the Senate show that the temperature is high. But “crisis” implies a system breaking down; what we’re watching so far is a system straining under exactly the pressure it was designed to absorb — messy, slow, litigated in public. That’s different from a collapse.

Whether the senator-judges can be trusted to conduct a fair, objective trial can’t be answered now. It will be answered by the vote count against the specific evidence presented, not by priors about the Senate’s composition.

But here is what would actually settle it, concretely: Each senator-judge, at the moment of voting, stating on the record which specific article of impeachment they are voting on and which specific piece of evidence — the bank records, the NBI testimony, the confidential funds documentation — moved them to that vote. Not a floor speech about “nation” or “conscience.”

A citation to the record, the way a judge writes a decision. That is the difference between a verdict and a head count.

If that happens, a conviction survives scrutiny because it will be traceable to evidence, not to Malacañang’s preference or to old grudges from the 2022 ticket.

An acquittal survives the same way — Duterte’s base can be told, credibly, that the prosecution simply didn’t meet the two-thirds threshold on the merits, not that money or fear bought her freedom.

Either outcome, reasoned this way, gives the country something to build on going into 2028: a record voters can actually consult when they decide whether “unexplained wealth” and an “assassination plot” were proven or weren’t.

If it doesn’t happen — if 16 or more senators vote to convict without saying why on the specific articles, or if enough senators acquit while visibly currying favor with a frontrunner they may need in 2028 — then the verdict becomes just another bullet point in the decades-long story of institutions bending to whoever has the momentum.