MANILA — President Rodrigo Duterte is "consistent" and "not plastic" in his stance towards Vice President Leni Robredo, Malacañang said Tuesday, after the latter said he was "unpresidential" for threatening her should she run in 2022.

Duterte made the statement on Monday during a speech meant to discuss COVID-19 updates. He began his public address and spent several minutes hitting Robredo with insinuations about where the Vice President spends her evenings, apparently misinformed that she had asked where he was at the height of Typhoon Ulysses, even when she did not.

"Hindi naman po plastik si Presidente at hindi naman po niya ngayon lang ginawa iyan. Consistent po ang behavior ng Presidente," said Presidential Spokesperson Harry Roque.

(The President is not plastic, and this is not the first time he did that. The President's behavior is consistent.)

"Is that unpresidential? I don't think so because 91 percent of the people have said they trust and believe the President is performing well," he told reporters, referring to a recent Pulse Asia survey.

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The survey was released in October when the Philippines was wrestling with the coronavirus outbreak, millions of its people were unemployed, and officials of the medical insurer were fighting multibillion-peso corruptions claims.

Even Pulse Asia found the survey result "shocking" and "unbelievable" that 9 in 10 respondents approved of Duterte, the pollster's president Ronald Holmes earlier said.

For political analyst Richard Heydarian, one factor could be the people's need for a "father figure" in times of national anxiety.

"As Littlefinger said in Game of Thrones, chaos is a ladder. Chaos is a ladder also for a populist," he said in a forum. "Whenever there is anxiety, they can show themselves as a savior, and President Duterte has done a good job of showing himself as a padre de familia (head of the family) that people can rely on."

The President will not apologize to Robredo, said Roque even though Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana and Duterte's chief legal counsel Salvador Panelo earlier said sorry for falsely claiming that Robredo rode a government plane to visit a typhoon-hit province.

• READ: Fact-check on Duterte's tirades vs Robredo, UP