Whoever advised President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. to provoke Vice President Sara Duterte should be fired.

“I always thought that we were (friends), but maybe I was deceived,” BBM told reporters covering the ASEAN Summit.

An incensed Vice-President would not allow that to pass without comment (severe tongue-lashing is more like it).

In an explosive press conference Friday morning, Vice-President Inday gave a faithful chronology of events of the days leading to her decision to run for the second highest post of the land in a team-up with BBM.

For close to two hours, she let off steam, firing rockets into the man who had the gall to turn the tables on her while subjecting her and her family to a vicious demolition job after what she and her two brothers did to help him win.

The entire country is aware that former President Rodrigo Duterte was no fan of BBM, calling him weak and indecisive. The Duterte siblings, however, openly campaigned for BBM after then-Mayor Sara accepted the invitation to be his VicePresident.

“Hindi ko kasalanan na hindi marunong maging Presidente (siBBM),” Vice President Inday declared with a straight face. It is as much a statement of fact and an indictment of a head of state who has made blunders and gaffes a way of life in his public engagements and press interviews. It would be a big mistake to ask her to elaborate. Why, even the man on the street can do that, starting with the butt of jokes that is the P20 per kilo of rice that never was.

The reporters were reminded of the familiar Duterte humor when, in response to the question on whether she would have run with former Vice-President Leni Robredo, she said while suppressing laughter: “Hindi man ako ni-request ni VP Leni natumakbong vice-president nya.”

She turned serious to say “no” because Leni would obviously go after her father, considering the company she keeps. As it turned out, BBM would become her family’s worst enemy, perhaps even worse than Leni would have been if it had gonethe other way.

She reiterated her declaration before Congress that she is now alone, this time enumerating the different players in the political spectrum and crime syndicates that have joined forces to remove her from the equation in 2028.

When the press conference was over, it was obvious that BBM was worse off than when it started. The temperature is expected to rise significantly as the list of the disenchanted and the discontented continues to grow with each passing day.

BBM cannot afford to play with the people’s temper, not with the increasing evidence of his administration’s incompetence and corruption, and more so because there is no sign of any light at the end of this long tunnel.

As the pressure continues to mount over BBM’s defiant silence to calls to undergo a hair follicle drug test, the better part of discretion would have been to stay out of sight, or at least go with the flow.

Those who know BBM swear there is no such thing as spontaneous answers, especially when they involve critical issues. If this is true, then he had been fed that line to say that he was “deceived.” If this morning’s press conference was a means to measure the impact of that remark, it proved that it was a big, perhaps fatal mistake.

Considering the extent of the damage inflicted on the President and with more expected, one question comes to mind: did the advice come from a closet anti-BBM?