Startling

Every day, a new low. Civility in government, it seems, has never been as under siege as it is now, with the new dispensation having virtually declared it a bad word, along with its cousin, “decency.” Those words were anathema to the presidential candidate from Davao and the supposedly insurgent movement he led, which packaged his maverick, protocol-disdaining persona as a badge of authenticity—the very antithesis to the honey tongues and hollow niceties of the establishment politicians he was up against.

But these days Rodrigo Duterte is no longer a candidate in need of distinctive branding. He is the President and chief executive of a country of over 100 million people, not just the 16 million who voted him into office. During the campaign, in the face of criticism that he didn’t seem to have the temperament and the maturity to be president, he promised a “metamorphosis” into someone more fit for the office once he got to Malacañang.

Has that happened? To the earnest entreaties of many, including his ardent supporters, that he learn to curb his tongue, that he be more thoughtful and less impetuous in his public pronouncements because they gain the force of official policy by their very utterance—that he endeavor to unify and inspire rather than further divide the nation with his often bellicose rhetoric, which then has to be walked back by his spokesmen—he has seemingly only shrugged, the promised “metamorphosis” conveniently forgotten.

In barely five months in office, Mr. Duterte has taken aim at an impressive gallery of supposed enemies, whom he has subjected to his trademark vituperation and needling apparently as a result of perceived slights to his person and style of governance: the United States and Barack Obama, the European Union, the United Nations, the media, the human rights community here and abroad—virtually anyone who has raised questions about the bull-in-a-china-shop governance he has imposed on the country, beginning with his troubling, blood-spattered war on drugs.

The way his administration has treated Vice President Leni Robredo is particularly startling. In the first days of his presidency, when it was expected that the two newly elected highest officials of the land would meet, as a first order of business, to present a picture of healing and shared vision after the rancor of the elections, Mr. Duterte instead said: “There is no compelling reason for me to accommodate the Vice President… The political alliances [are] between me, my family, and the family of Bongbong [Marcos].”

Marcos had complained of fraud after Robredo defeated him for the VP post by a slim margin. Nevertheless, Robredo was duly proclaimed, and is entitled to respect, at the very least, for her constitutionally mandated role as the country’s next most important public official after the president. Mr. Duterte eventually gave in to the public clamor for a gesture of reconciliation with Robredo by giving her the housing portfolio in his Cabinet.

That rapprochement didn’t last. Last Sunday, Robredo announced she was tendering her resignation from Duterte’s administration after she received a text message from Cabinet Secretary Leoncio Evasco Jr. informing her that, per the President’s instruction, she was to “desist from attending all Cabinet meetings” starting Dec. 5. Government spokesmen would eventually cite “irreconcilable differences” for Mr. Duterte’s order. Sidelined like this, Robredo would have been rendered useless in her department.

The President, it appears, could not even be bothered to make a phone call, much less talk face to face with the Vice President, that an order of such consequence had to be relayed by an underling through a text message. Civility has apparently gone the way of the victims of his war on drugs—dead by the wayside, and branded an enemy.