Duterte and Trump: Similarities in personality —AFP
Donald Trump’s upset victory over much-favored Hillary Clinton will be talked about by pollsters for a long, long time.
It can be considered a repeat of the Truman-Dewey electoral contest 68 years ago.
On Nov. 2, 1948, incumbent Harry S. Truman, a Democrat, defeated Republican New York Gov. Thomas E. Dewey, who was heavily favored to win over the White House occupant.
Survey firms and political analysts at the time were so sure of a Dewey victory that long before the last vote was counted, the Chicago Daily Tribune blared in its headline: “Dewey defeats Truman.”
People in the United States and even in the Philippines, where results of popularity polls were accepted as gospel truth, now look at surveys in a different light.
Pollsters and media outlets in the United States failed to penetrate the heart of the voting population, the Silent Majority.
Trump is the US version of our Rodrigo Duterte; Duterte is the Philippine version of Trump.
Both are abrasive and brusque.
My bold prediction: Trump and Duterte will at first repel each other, but eventually become friends.
Trump will soon realize Duterte is his spitting image, and vice versa.
Their friendship will be based on mutual respect.
Unlike his predecessors, Trump will realize that the country is no longer a US lackey under Duterte.
The United States under Trump will no longer treat the Philippines as its little brown brother, but an equal.
The United States will no longer give hand-me-downs to the Philippines but will sell us military hardware at cost because the United States knows we can buy from other countries like China and Russia.
The Philippines under Duterte will start to manufacture weapons, using Filipino ingenuity, and other things.
The United States and China will fall all over themselves offering help or extending loans to the Philippines because they know this country is on its way to becoming First World.
Am I having a vision? All the things in this world started from a vision.
What we Filipinos can conceive, we can achieve.
So, start dreaming, my compatriots!
We Filipinos should prepare for the time when we become First World.
The time to prepare is now.
I predict that when Duterte leaves office six years from now, the country will have a tiger economy and on its way to becoming First World.
Right now, I’m having a vision of the Philippines outpacing its neighbors on the economic front.
I don’t know why, but I feel it as I am writing this column.
There were several instances in the past when I predicted events long before they happened.
One was in 2007 when I had a vision that a Malacañang occupant would become seriously ill, three months before former first gentleman Mike Arroyo had a heart attack and an aneurysm.
I wrote about that vision in this column on Jan. 27, 2007.
Mike Arroyo became sick in April 2007.
In 2013, I also predicted that a disaster much bigger than the Bohol earthquake would befall the country, a month before Supertyphoon “Yolanda” flattened Eastern Visayas on Nov. 8 that year.
I was in Bohol with my staff and some doctors from St. Luke’s Medical Center doing a medical mission for the earthquake victims.
Our team was on a boat on our way back to Panglao town after doing a medical mission in Loon, one of the worst-hit areas, when I made a dire prediction.
I blurted out to Rosalin Ferrer, my chief of staff in “Isumbong Mo Kay Tulfo,” “Alin, before the year ends, a disaster much bigger than this earthquake will happen. Let’s stock up on food and medicines so we will be prepared when it takes place.”
When we returned to Manila, we bought medicines and canned goods for the expected disaster.
A week later, Yolanda struck.
And because we were prepared, my medical and mercy mission was the first NGO to reach Tacloban City three days after Yolanda, with the help of Ramon Ang who then owned Philippine Airlines.