It’s not only Filipinos that have taken note of President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr.’s frequent international trips.
His continuing abroad travels became a question in the long-running American game show ‘Jeopardy’ for its final round.
In this quiz show, contestants are given a general knowledge clue and have to guess the question it answers. For the Final Jeopardy of the Feb. 21 episode, a prompt about current world leaders was given: “In office from 2022, the president of this country has taken so many foreign trips. A play on his name is ‘Ferdinand Magellan Jr.'” One contestant was correctly able to figure out that this was referring to the Philippines.
Since assuming office, Marcos has been known as the president among the post-EDSA chiefs that has traveled the globe the most in a short time. A globetrotter like Magellan, he’s been to nine countries in the span of eight months—including Indonesia, the United States, Singapore, Cambodia, Belgium, Thailand, China, Switzerland, and Japan—for “productive” state visits and a grand prix.
Some of these trips, however—productive as the president may say they were—drew the ire of critics and Filipinos. While Marcos was in Singapore for the F1 Grand Prix, provinces in the Philippines were struggling to recover from the aftermath of Super Typhoon Karding in October 2022.
Marcos said he’s cutting on travels for 2023, but his attendance has already been confirmed in APEC happening in the US.
This wasn’t the first time a question about a Marcos was asked on Jeopardy. In the show’s June 2022 episode, there was an item about the late Ferdinand Marcos Sr. “In 1986, this Philippine president and his pals stuffed $7.7 million into suitcases and fled to Hawaii, where he died three years later.”
Who is Marcos?#Jeopardy: June 21, 2022 pic.twitter.com/LrOCAyVYDW
— 𝙥𝙖𝙪𝙡𝙤𝙞𝙣𝙢𝙖𝙣𝙞𝙡𝙖.𝙤𝙛𝙛𝙞𝙘𝙞𝙖𝙡 (@pauloMDtweets) June 22, 2022
Pinoy pride for making it on Jeopardy?
