But even in the company of neo-authoritarian rulers from Brazil to Hungary to Thailand, Duterte is an extraordinary and in many ways inexplicable figure. The Philippines is, after all, the country that 34 years ago, in a movement known as “People Power,” overthrew a dictator, Ferdinand Marcos. Yet Duterte resembles Marcos in many respects. In fact, in a gesture of tremendous symbolic importance early in his presidency, he had Marcos’s remains moved from their obscure burial place and installed, with a military honor guard and a 21-gun salute, at Manila’s national cemetery. The move seemed to say that the days of People Power were in the past, and that strongman rule is the wave of the present.

Read: The thug appeal of Rodrigo Duterte

Duterte, moreover, is exceptionally popular even by the standards of other figures with transgressive manners and populist appeal. Trump may enjoy the unshakable loyalty of around 40 percent of the American electorate, but Duterte’s approval rating has been persistently around 80 percent. This political power was on full display in legislative elections last year when every one of the 12 candidates Duterte endorsed for the country’s 24-seat senate was elected. Unlike Trump, there was no midterm setback for Duterte.

What explains this remarkable phenomenon? For one, Duterte resorts to methods that are by now well established in the global strongman’s toolbox: He uses social media to tarnish opponents, deploying an army of internet trolls to pounce on anybody who publicly criticizes him, a move that serves to intimidate those who have not yet spoken out. When Vitug, the journalist, published a book which criticized Duterte’s abandonment of the Philippine territorial claim, not only was she attacked on social media, but the country’s main bookstore chain declined to put the book on sale, apparently out of fear of retaliation from Duterte. He has taken other classically autocratic steps, such as using the judiciary to muzzle the press and political opponents: Last year, Maria Ressa, the editor of the independent investigative news website Rappler, was indicted on charges of tax evasion; meanwhile, Leila de Lima, a sitting member of the senate who, like Ressa, chastised Duterte for extrajudicial killings, recently completed her thousandth day in jail, having been convicted of taking bribes from drug dealers, a charge that is widely viewed as trumped up.

There’s something reminiscent in this of the Marcos years, when the country’s leading opposition figure, Benigno Aquino Jr., was imprisoned for years on manufactured charges of weapons possession and subversion. A few months ago, a mysterious, hooded man who gave his name as “Bikoy” claimed in a YouTube video that he was a former drug-cartel associate in possession of documents showing drug money pouring into the accounts of the Duterte family. The unfolding of events following the video gets complicated, including the arrest of the man claiming to be Bikoy and his retraction of the sensational claim. But the main consequence was that the Duterte government charged some 30 people, including a former three-term senator, Antonio Trillanes, and Duterte’s own vice president, Leni Robredo, with “inciting sedition.” (Robredo was not an ally of Duterte’s; she’s a member of the opposition Liberal Party and was elected on that party’s ticket.) The aim of the accused persons, the charge says, was “to agitate the general population into making mass protest with the possibility of bringing down the president,” hence “inciting sedition.”