President Rodrigo Duterte and Sen. Antonio Trillanes IV (File photo from the Philippine Daily Inquirer)
In an escalation of verbal hostilities between the two officials, Sen. Antonio Trillanes IV on Sunday challenged President Rodrigo Duterte to have him shot, warning that it would “lead to your end.”
“Go ahead, Mr. Duterte, order somebody to shoot me and, I assure you, it would lead to your end,” the opposition senator said in a statement.
Trillanes was responding to the President’s comments, made in a speech to new barangay officials in Cebu City on Thursday night, that he always acted “tough and threatening,” thought “he’s better than he is,” but was actually “ordinary.”
‘Someone will shoot him’
“He’s always calling for a fight. He believes that he’s the only tough one around because nobody fought him back. But there will come a day that someone will shoot him because he’s arrogant,” the President said.
His comments came after Labor Undersecretary Jacinto Paras claimed that Trillanes threatened him on the sidelines of a Senate hearing last month.
In a complaint he filed in the Pasay City prosecutor’s office, Paras said he believed Trillanes’ threat was connected to the graft and sedition charges he brought against the senator in November last year.
Trillanes has denied the charges, saying Paras has “zero credibility.”
A former naval officer and leader of the 2003 junior military officers’ mutiny and the 2007 coup attempt against then President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, Trillanes is one of the most vocal critics of the Duterte administration in the Senate.
Standing up to a bully
“During my entire public life, I have stood up and fought against the crooked, the corrupt, the oppressors and abusers of power like Duterte,” the senator said on Sunday.
“I have never bullied the helpless and innocent. Now, as to his threat that somebody would shoot me someday, only Duterte would want me dead because it irks him that somebody dared to stand toe to toe with him,” he said.
“My standing up to him makes him look weak and powerless, which is contrary to his objective of making the whole Filipino society afraid of him,” he added.
Trillanes’ term expires next year.
In an interview with reporters on Wednesday, Trillanes said he had no plans to seek another public office.
“[B]ut I won’t disappear. I will continue with my advocacy. I will still stand up to Duterte. I will show him that I don’t need a position to stand up to him,” he said.
Asked if he feared for his safety outside public office, he replied: “Let him do his worst. I will show him how cowardly he is. ‘Look, I have no more position. Go ahead.’”