IS MARCOS MANAGING HIS IMAGE MORE THAN THE COUNTRY?
Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s presidency shows a persistent gap between strong rhetoric and completed action. His record on the West Philippine Sea, flood-control corruption, misinformation, and Sara Duterte’s impeachment suggests that he can act decisively, but becomes more cautious when family, allies, and political survival are involved. After four years, the question is whether he is managing the country—or managing his image.
12 min read
THE SPEECH THAT SOUNDED STRONGER THAN THE RECORD
In his fifth State of the Nation Address, Ferdinand Marcos Jr. told Congress that the flood-control investigation was moving even toward his cousin, former House Speaker Martin Romualdez.
It was one of the strongest moments of the speech. Marcos presented himself as a President willing to choose the Filipino people over family and friends.
I wanted to believe that part.
But I also found it difficult to accept at face value because much of the proof still rests on what the government says will happen next. Cases are nearing filing. More money will be recovered. More officials will be charged. More laws will be passed. More programs will be completed.
Ang dating sa akin: may masabi lang na may ginagawa ako.
That was my first reaction. But I did not want to stop there because Marcos has taken real action in several areas. It would be dishonest to erase those decisions simply because I dislike him.
The harder question is whether those actions show steady leadership, or whether he becomes firm only after the political danger has already become manageable.
I AM NOT NEUTRAL ABOUT MARCOS
I am not a Marcos fan.
I cannot, for the life of me, forget who he is, what his family did, and where he stood while his father was in power.
Marcos Jr. was already an adult and governor of Ilocos Norte when his family fled Malacañang in 1986. Years later, the Supreme Court declared hundreds of millions of dollars in Marcos Swiss deposits ill-gotten wealth and ordered the money forfeited to the Philippine government.
That history is burned into my memory.
His performance as a local official and senator never convinced me that he would become a strong national manager. Four years as President have not erased those doubts.
But dislike is not an excuse for lazy analysis. Marcos has made decisions worth recognizing. His West Philippine Sea policy deserves credit. The flood-control investigation has produced actual cases. His government has also taken concrete action against misinformation, although I have serious doubts about how evenly that action is being applied.
I can admit when he gets something right without forgetting the man, the family, and the history behind him, because being honest about the record does not mean forgiving any of it.
THE QUESTION I WANTED TO TEST
I looked closely at four areas: the West Philippine Sea, flood-control corruption, Sara Duterte’s impeachment, and misinformation.
The research quickly ruled out the easiest accusation.
Marcos does not simply sit there and do nothing. He can make a clear choice, use presidential power, and stay with a policy.
The West Philippine Sea proves that.
The pattern becomes less clear in domestic controversies, especially when a decision could damage powerful allies, relatives, political arrangements, or the Marcos name itself.
In those cases, action often arrives in stages. Another institution carries the confrontation first. Congress moves. An agency investigates. A court intervenes. Public pressure grows. Then the President takes a stronger position while keeping enough distance from the ugliest part of the conflict.
That does not prove what Marcos is thinking.
There is no document saying he delays a decision to protect his image. There is no written instruction telling agencies to shield his relatives. There is no direct proof that every cautious move is motivated by political survival.
But timelines still matter.
They show us when he acts, how far he goes, how long he waits, and how much political danger he appears willing to accept.
THE WEST PHILIPPINE SEA SHOWS HE CAN CHOOSE
The West Philippine Sea is probably Marcos’s strongest case.
His administration expanded defense access with the United States, strengthened security ties with Japan and Australia, signed the Philippine Maritime Zones Act, and kept the 2016 arbitral ruling at the center of Philippine policy.
The Japan-Philippines Reciprocal Access Agreement also entered into force in September 2025, making joint training and defense cooperation easier.
These are not empty speeches.
They are actual diplomatic, legal, and military decisions. China opposed several of them, which means Marcos cannot be accused of choosing a completely risk-free position.
Compared with Rodrigo Duterte’s constant effort to accommodate Beijing, the change is obvious and commendable.
But the policy remains unfinished where ordinary Filipinos feel it most.
A decade after the arbitral ruling, fishermen from Masinloc still report being driven away from Scarborough Shoal. Chinese ships continue to block Philippine vessels, use water cannons, and create dangerous encounters at sea.
In July 2026, new confrontations were reported near Second Thomas Shoal and Scarborough Shoal. A Filipino sailor was injured, while Chinese Coast Guard vessels again used water cannons against Philippine government boats.
This is where I understand the caution.
Marcos refuses to turn every confrontation into a naval showdown. China is a much larger military power, and a careless decision could cost Filipino lives. Caution in this case can be responsible leadership.
But the limits are still there.
Philippine law is clearer. Our alliances are stronger. The government now speaks more forcefully about our rights. But Filipino fishermen are still asking what all of those gains have changed for them on the water.
So yes, I give Marcos credit for choosing the right strategic direction.
I just cannot pretend that the job is finished.
The policy is commendable, but the execution remains incomplete. The direction is clear, but the actual protection reaching fishermen is still nowhere near enough.
FLOOD CONTROL SHOWS THE LIMITS OF THE SPEECH
The flood-control scandal gives us a different picture.
Marcos publicly exposed the scale of the problem in 2025. His administration reviewed projects, created the Independent Commission for Infrastructure through Executive Order No. 94, opened a public complaints portal, reduced the public-works budget, froze assets, and referred cases for prosecution.
Those were concrete actions.
As of July 2026, GMA News Research found 45 individuals charged in 26 court cases.
That is not nothing.
But the same review found that only two of the 15 contractors earlier identified as receiving a large share of flood-control spending had been charged. That leaves a very long distance between the size of the scandal and the reach of the cases filed so far.
The money tells the same story.
Marcos said nearly ₱25 billion in assets had been recovered, frozen, seized, or preserved. More than ₱800 million had actually been returned to the National Treasury.
Those categories do not mean the same thing.
A frozen property remains subject to legal proceedings. A preserved asset is not yet money restored to taxpayers. A filed case is not a conviction. An investigation is not the same as accountability completed.
The administration has done more than issue press releases. That much is clear.
But the rhetoric continues to move faster than the completed result.
In November 2025, Marcos vowed that people implicated in the scandal would be jailed before the end of the year. He said they would not have a merry Christmas.
That line created an image of fast punishment.
The legal process moved more slowly, as legal cases often do.
His cousin, Martin Romualdez, appeared near the center of the presidential speech only about a year after the crackdown began. That sequence can reasonably raise questions about political caution.
It cannot prove that Marcos protected Romualdez.
Cases involving senior political figures can take longer to build. Evidence has to be gathered. Financial links have to be traced. Individual participation has to be established. Romualdez also denies wrongdoing.
Still, the public has the right to notice the order in which things happened.
The investigation moved first through officials and contractors. The President’s cousin became a central subject of his rhetoric much later.
Maybe that was simply how the evidence developed.
Maybe the political ground had also become safer.
At this point, we can prove the timeline. We cannot prove the motive.
What we can also measure is the distance between the force of the language and the proof available to the public.
Marcos used the power of the presidency to promise accountability. He still has to show that the process will reach the most powerful people involved, survive political pressure, produce actual judgments, and recover far more than the government has recovered so far.
THE USEFUL DISTANCE OF THE IMPEACHMENT PROCESS
Sara Duterte’s impeachment shows another feature of Marcos’s leadership.
In 2023, he said she did not deserve to be impeached. In November 2024, he described the growing impeachment effort as a distraction that would not improve Filipino lives.
After the House process advanced, his public position became procedural.
In February 2025, he said the executive branch had no role in impeachment.
Legally, he was correct.
The House impeaches. The Senate conducts the trial. A President should not claim a constitutional power that the executive branch does not have.
But the position was also politically useful.
Congress could carry the confrontation against his former running mate while Marcos stayed outside the formal process. He did not have to publicly demand her conviction. He did not have to defend her. He did not have to accept direct responsibility for whatever happened next.
The Supreme Court later voided the first impeachment case under the Constitution’s one-year rule. The Court also made clear that its ruling did not absolve Duterte of the allegations against her.
The House impeached her again on May 11, 2026, with 257 voting yes, 25 voting no, and nine abstaining.
There is no verified evidence that Marcos secretly ordered those votes.
The overwhelming House tally does not automatically prove a private presidential command. Congress has its own political interests, alliances, ambitions, and reasons for moving against Duterte.
The observable part is simpler.
Marcos first opposed impeachment. When the process acquired enough support to move without him, he emphasized his constitutional distance from it.
That may be clever politics.
It may even be the proper constitutional posture.
But it also allows a major confrontation to happen around the President while his personal responsibility remains difficult to pin down.
This is one of the patterns I keep seeing.
Marcos benefits from the decision, but another institution absorbs much of the political cost.
FAKE NEWS AND THE STANDARD HE HAS NOT YET PROVED
Misinformation is where my distrust of this administration runs deepest.
The factual record shows that the government has taken action.
In 2023, the administration launched a media and information literacy campaign. In 2025, the Presidential Communications Office signed an agreement with the Cybercrime Investigation and Coordinating Center.
In 2026, it launched Oplan Kontra Fake News, created a reporting desk, coordinated with the justice and information departments, pressed Meta to act, and endorsed complaints for investigation.
The House also approved the proposed Digital Media Anti-False Information Act. The measure would require online platforms to maintain a legal presence in the Philippines and impose heavy fines and possible imprisonment for deliberately spreading false information that causes verified harm.
Even some supporters of stronger regulation have warned that the safeguards must be tightened so that legitimate journalism, criticism, satire, and dissent are not punished.
This is already far beyond simply telling people to check their sources.
But it also raises a harder question.
Why did the urgency become so visible only later?
Government action in 2026 moved quickly against false reports about Marcos’s health, claims involving an energy emergency, and posts the administration said could create panic or threaten public order.
The Presidential Communications Office also praised the National Bureau of Investigation after the arrest of a former broadcaster accused of spreading false information about the President’s health.
Now compare that speed with the years of false claims that helped clean the Marcos family’s history.
Researchers, journalists, and election fact-checkers documented how online falsehoods before the 2022 election overwhelmingly favored Marcos and attacked his opponents.
Many of those narratives claimed that Martial Law was a golden age, that human-rights abuses were invented or exaggerated, and that court cases involving ill-gotten wealth had already cleared the Marcos family.
Marcos did not need to create those lies personally to benefit from them.
The available evidence does not prove that he ordered, financed, or directly controlled the networks that spread them.
But what remains missing is an equally forceful presidential campaign against falsehoods that help his own name.
In 2023, the Department of Education confirmed that officials had considered changing the term “Diktadurang Marcos” to the more general “Diktadura” in a draft curriculum.
DepEd said the proposal was still under review. It also said the lessons on Martial Law and the Marcos dictatorship would remain. At the time, Sara Duterte headed the department, and there is no evidence that Marcos personally ordered the proposed wording change.
Still, the episode captures my problem with this administration.
Its officials can speak forcefully about the danger of fake news while education officials under the same government consider removing the Marcos name from the specific term used to describe the Marcos dictatorship.
The distinction may look small.
It is not.
A dictatorship was not some weather event that simply appeared. It had a name. It had a family at its center. It had officials, victims, stolen wealth, imprisoned critics, tortured activists, silenced journalists, and people who disappeared.
Removing the name makes the history easier to soften.
That is my opinion, but it is an opinion based on what that specific language does.
A fair anti-disinformation policy has to apply the same pressure in every direction. It cannot become urgent only when a lie damages the President, scares investors, embarrasses an agency, or threatens the administration.
The government has already shown how fast it can act when a false post concerns Marcos’s health.
It has not shown the same appetite for confronting the historical lies that helped return his family to Malacañang.
THE POLITICAL SAFETY OF PARTIAL ACTION
Across these four cases, Marcos does not look powerless.
He looks careful about where he spends political capital.
He can stand firmly on the West Philippine Sea because the Armed Forces, diplomats, international partners, and much of the public support a tougher position. Even there, he avoids moves that could trigger an open conflict, which I understand.
The pattern looks different when the issue comes closer to home.
Flood-control accountability becomes more complicated when investigations approach lawmakers, major contractors, and his own cousin.
Sara Duterte’s impeachment proceeds through Congress while Marcos takes the legally accurate but politically convenient position that the executive has no formal role.
Anti-fake-news enforcement becomes visibly aggressive against harmful claims affecting the administration, while historical distortion favorable to the Marcos name receives far less direct presidential attention.
None of this proves a hidden plan.
But in the cases I examined, the pattern suggests a President who prefers room to retreat.
He lets agencies, lawmakers, courts, and allies test the political ground. Stronger action often comes after pressure has grown, after another institution has taken the first risk, or after the safer political direction has become clearer.
Sometimes that protects the country from reckless decision-making.
Sometimes it protects the President.
The problem is that we cannot always tell where one ends and the other begins.
That approach can also weaken government command.
Agencies wait for a clearer signal. Allies learn that accountability may depend on timing. Announcements start counting as accomplishments long before the public receives the result. Responsibility for delay is spread so widely across the bureaucracy that no one fully owns the failure.
This is where, in my view, image management begins to affect actual management.
Marcos maintains the appearance of calm. He avoids Duterte’s constant aggression. He rarely sounds rattled. He allows other people to fight while he stays presidential.
That political style may help him preserve alliances, protect the Marcos brand, and retain influence over whoever comes after him in 2028.
It may also be exactly what makes him weaker as a manager and leader.
WHAT FOUR YEARS NOW SHOW
Marcos has had good moments.
His West Philippine Sea stance is the clearest one, even with its operational limits. The flood-control investigation has gone farther than empty posturing, and I will acknowledge that if the cases continue toward the most powerful people involved.
His government has also built a real anti-misinformation response.
The question is whether it will apply that response honestly, including against lies that benefit Marcos himself.
I still cannot forget the man, the family, and the dictatorship that came before this presidency.
Recognition of a good policy does not require political amnesia.
Four years have also given us enough time to judge the habit behind the speeches.
Marcos acts, but the firmness of his actions often seems to depend on how politically dangerous full commitment would be.
Where the personal cost is higher, he leaves himself distance. He chooses partial steps. He lets another institution move first. He promises what the government still has to finish.
That may protect his calm and moderate image. It may help him preserve alliances and influence over the political future after 2028.
For the country, the cost is a presidency that often sounds more complete than its actual work.
Marcos still has two years to prove that his actions can become larger than his rhetoric.
At this point, another strong speech will not do it.
SOURCES
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