How to decrypt Duterte’s words

So when do we know if the President is talking sense?

His spokesman says always listen to Malacañang press briefings.

Presidential spokesman Ernesto Abella issued the statement after President Rodrigo Duterte said on Wednesday that only two of his five statements are true.

“Listen to the press conferences. All right?” Abella said in a Palace briefing on Thursday when asked how reporters would know if the President is talking serious or just kidding.

“Well, technically, what we do emphasize in the press conferences are vetted and properly vetted — I’m not saying it’s not properly vetted, I’m saying, simply saying that at this stage when we say it, it simply means to say we have gone through the process of discerning whether it was a joke or not,” he added.

Duterte, in a speech on Wednesday at the Bureau of Customs, admitted: “Eh, sa limang salita [ko], dalawa lang ‘yung tama niyan, ‘yung tatlo puro kalokohan ‘yan,” he said.

(Two out of five things I’ve said were true. The rest were nonsense.)

Asked to expound on this, Abella said the President was just trying to be “colorful.”

He said Duterte is “very serious” and “is very consistent” with his statements – but sometimes he deviates and could “be quite humorous.”

“But when there’s a particular statement that needs to be, for example, if it tends to be policy, it would be underlined here. It would be underlined during the press conferences,” he said.

The President has said the media are not “attuned to his character.”

Duterte had issued statements in the past public speeches and interviews which he would latter claim as nothing but jokes.

During his arrival speech from a state visit in Japan in October, the chief executive said he would stop swearing because God talked to him while on his way back to the Philippines.

Several days after, he said he was not serious when he said God talked to him.

In August 2015, the President threatened to pull the Philippines out of the United Nations as he launched a profanity-laden tirade against the world body for criticizing his brutal war on drugs.

He, however, said that his threat was made in jest.

During the campaign period, the then Davao City mayor said he would ride a jetski to the disputed West Philippine Sea but later clarified, after being elected as President, that he won’t do it, explaining it was just a hyperbole.