Philippines Vice President Sara Duterte on Saturday told reporters in an early morning press conference that she’s already spoken with an assassin and ordered him to kill President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos, First Lady Liza Araneta, and House Speaker Martin Romualdez immediately if Duterte is killed, Reuters reports on a pretty wacky situation in the southeast Asian archipelago.
“I have talked to a person. I said, if I get killed, go kill BBM [Marcos], Liza Araneta, and Martin Romualdez. No joke. No joke,” Duterte, daughter of autocratic former President Rodrigo Duterte, said in what Reuters describes as a “profanity-laden briefing” to reporters. “I said, do not stop until you kill them, and then he said yes,” Duterte continued. The office of the Philippine vice president is elected separately from the president and has no official powers. Duterte resigned from Marcos’s cabinet in June after their temporary alliance had collapsed due to disagreements over foreign policy and the aftermath of Rodrigo Duterte’s murderous war on drugs which saw thousands summarily executed in the streets whether or not they had actually been involved in the narcotics trade. Then there’s also that Duterte Senior, who left office in 2022, has been agitating on and off for his home base in the poorer southern region of Mindanao to secede from the rest of the country.
It’s not clear if Sara Duterte had slipped a Mike Pence joke in her tirade against Marcos.