I wrote a piece a while back about why the Pink and Yellow factions appear to be propping up an administration they spent years opposing. Moral decoupling, I called it — the cold discipline of separating a player’s flaws from their usefulness and running the two ledgers separately. Readers liked it. A few asked the obvious follow-up question, the one I’d ask if I were still in the room: fine, but what would you tell the other side?
So let’s do that. Let’s sit in the other war room for a minute — the one defending Vice President Sara Duterte as her second impeachment trial opened last week — and read the same board from that chair.
I’ll say this up front: neither the Vice President nor her office is a client of mine — though I won’t pretend I’m neutral about how this ends. This is the same exercise as the last piece: reading the mechanics, not just the merits. But if a client walked into my office this week with this exact problem, here’s what I’d open with.
The Fight Everyone’s Watching Isn’t the Fight That Matters
Every headline is going to frame this as a corruption trial. ₱612.5 million in confidential funds. Unexplained wealth. SALN violations. And sure, that’s the evidence that’ll get argued over 92 trial days.
But that’s not the fight. Here’s the fight: conviction doesn’t just remove her from office — it bars her from ever holding elected office again. Which means this isn’t a referendum on how she spent intelligence funds. It’s an eligibility contest for 2028, and it’s being decided on a Senate floor two years before a single ballot gets cast.
I’d tell my client to stop litigating the money in public and start treating this as what it actually is: the other side trying to win an election by getting the other candidate disqualified before the race begins. Everyone in that chamber already knows this. Say it out loud, and you reframe every news cycle that follows.
Borrow the Permission Slip
Here’s a trick I described in the last piece from the opposition’s side: the “BBM Bonus,” the permission slip Marcos handed the Pinks and Yellows so they could say “we’re supporting the policy, not the person” without admitting they’d switched teams.
That instrument isn’t exclusive property. Build the same one for the senators you need.
A second impeachment complaint, filed the same week a one-year constitutional bar expired, with charges that include “threats” against sitting officials — that’s a gift for anyone who wants to object to process without ever having to defend the person. Give wavering senators a clean sentence to hide behind: “I’m defending due process, not the Vice President.” You don’t need them to like her. You need them sixteen votes short of convicting her, and permission slips are cheaper than persuasion.
The Two Lefts Don’t Merge — Don’t Let Anyone Tell You Otherwise
I wrote a second piece arguing that “the Philippine left” is actually two lefts that have despised each other since 1992 — the national-democratic bloc and the Akbayan-liberal bloc. Both filed impeachment complaints against the Vice President this year — separately. No merger, no joint statement, no shared strategy — just two rival traditions independently arriving at the same target from opposite directions.
Every commentator is going to be tempted to collapse that into “the opposition.” Don’t let them. The seam between those two blocs is real, it’s thirty years deep, and it’s the single best asset the defense has that it didn’t have to manufacture. Every time a NatDem partisan calls Akbayan collaborationist, or an Akbayan figure distances itself from the armed left, that’s free proof there’s no united front — just two tracks that happen to be running in parallel this year. A strategist’s job here isn’t to build a bridge. It’s to keep pointing at the one that was never built.
Fatigue Doesn’t Care Whose Side You’re On
The most transferable line from the last piece was this one: message fatigue never announces itself. I wrote it about a public tired of righteous opposition. It applies just as well here.
A second impeachment, arriving almost exactly a year after the first one got thrown out on procedural grounds, is exactly the kind of rerun a tired electorate stops rewarding — even among people who aren’t remotely sympathetic to the Vice President personally. If her numbers are already climbing while the President’s are softening, that’s not necessarily conviction turning into support. It’s more likely fatigue turning into sympathy for whoever looks like they’re being put through it twice. That’s a fragile asset, not a durable one — and I’d tell my client not to spend it by overplaying the grievance until people get tired of hearing about that, too.
Fight the Sovereignty Battle at Home, Not at The Hague
There’s a second front here I’d flag, even though it’s not the trial everyone’s watching this week: the ICC case, set to open in November. That fight is not winnable as “the tribunal has no legitimacy” — the charges are confirmed, the victims are participating, the calendar is set. Contesting that in front of an international audience is a losing argument dressed up as a strong one.
The winnable version of that argument lives entirely at home: an administration that markets itself as tough on foreign incursions in the West Philippine Sea also handed a former Philippine president to a foreign court. Run that contradiction at the nationalist wing of the President’s own coalition. Don’t waste a single talking point trying to relitigate the tribunal itself.
The Tool I’d Leave in the Drawer
One more thing I’d say plainly, because a good strategist tells a client what not to reach for as much as what to use. Red-tagging — blurring legal dissent into insurgent affiliation — is sitting right there in the state’s toolkit, and it would be tempting to point it at Makabayan-aligned critics this week. I’d advise against it. The Supreme Court has already found the practice threatens constitutional rights, and stacking that exposure on top of an active international crimes-against-humanity case is a bad trade for a client who needs the opposite of more human-rights exposure right now. Leave it in the drawer.
The Bottom Line:Sara Duterte’s impeachment trial is an eligibility fight for 2028
To the public, this trial is about ₱612.5 million and a stack of SALN filings. To a strategist, it’s an eligibility fight for an election two years out, and the smartest defense doesn’t spend its energy relitigating the ledger — it spends it on sixteen senators, a real seam between two lefts that never merged, and a sympathy bump that has a shelf life.
And I’d say the same thing to this client that I said to the last one: choosing your battles isn’t weakness. It’s the whole job.
Read the companion piece: The Enemy of My Enemy Is a Strategy, Not a Truce. Have a case you’d like a strategist’s read on — from either chair? Drop me a line at nicgabjr@gmail.com.
