PBS News Hour

Last week I was watching the PBS News Hour after dinner and one of the segments caught my eye. Do you think Trump is following President Duterte in the Philippines rules of dictatorship?

Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa discusses state of U.S. democracy

By Amna Nawaz and Mike Fritz

Mar 3, 2025

Nobel Peace Prize laureate and journalist Maria Ressa has long fought for global press freedom. Her book, "How To Stand Up To A Dictator," detailed her experience running the news site Rappler under the autocratic regime of President Duterte in the Philippines. Ressa joined Amna Nawaz to discuss parallels between the Philippines and the U.S. under President Trump for our series, On Democracy.

[...]

Amna Nawaz:

So there's been a lot of concerns you have seen about President Trump's continuing attacks on the press and concerns about a loss of press freedom.

I want you to start by just comparing what you lived through, what you documented, what you covered under Duterte with what we have seen in the first several weeks of this second Trump administration so far.

Maria Ressa:

It's exactly what we have lived through, except accelerated. It's incredible how fast it's going.

And part of that is organization, right? But what we did in the Philippines is, within six months — the Constitution of the Philippines is patterned after the United States. We have three branches of government and a powerful executive.

But within six months of the election of Rodrigo Duterte, of him taking office, all of the checks and balances had collapsed. He was an all-powerful — the most powerful leader the country had ever known. And critical to that, crucial to that is silencing the press and the justice system, the court system, right, because — and I think that's what we're beginning to see right now.

Does that sound familiar?

Amna Nawaz:

Let me ask you about a few individual things we have seen.

You have obviously seen the president go after specific news networks. He's also opened a probe into PBS, we should note. He's also blocked access for the Associated Press, known as the AP, for their refusal to call it just the Gulf of America, as he wants. They call it the Gulf of Mexico and say he wants to change the name.

Now, the AP, we should note, serves thousands of news organizations. They have a reporter in every single statehouse in America, hundreds of countries — rather, over 100 countries across the world. What does it say to you that he's going after the AP? What's at stake in their lawsuit against the president here?

Maria Ressa:

It's not just press freedom that's at stake, right?

And, again, let me ground it first in what happened in the Philippines. Our president then went after the largest newspaper, the largest television station, and then online. We were the largest. We were number three. But go big, go fast, take them down quickly, make an example.

I was the example of a journalist. I had had, oh, my gosh, a long career. I had headed the largest network in the Philippines after almost 20 years with CNN. And then, when the charges came — so first social media, the attacks came bottom up. You say a lie a million times, it becomes a fact. And it was that journalist equals criminal.

Two years before I was actually arrested, they trended that, the network that was created online, so the propaganda. Then, a year later, we had the first criminal charges, 21 of them, and then, by two years later, by 2019, I was arrested. And then it was 10 criminal charges in a little over a year.

Look, what you're seeing is death by 1,000 cuts of democracy. This is exactly what I had written about in the book. And, originally, I was speaking to Filipinos, but it is a cautionary tale for every democracy, where technology is the spark that allows populism to become authoritarianism and to shift over. I think we're seeing this now.

It is like Trump is using President Duterte as a guide!

Here is the video of the interview, it is well worth the ten minutes...