THE BAHAMAS HIRES TRUMP’S LONGEST-SERVING ADVISER.

The Government of The Bahamas, through Washington firm DCI Group, has retained Roger Stone — the man who has advised Donald Trump longer than anyone else in American politics — to help represent Bahamian interests in the United States.

The reaction in some quarters has been predictable. The substance points the other way.

Stone’s working relationship with Trump goes back to the early 1980s, when Trump was the very first client of the firm Stone co-founded. That is more than four decades of continuous proximity to the man who is now, again, President of the United States. In an administration where access flows through a small circle of long-standing confidants rather than through traditional channels, that kind of line into the Oval Office is not a luxury. It is the mechanism by which small countries get heard.

The contract is public. It was filed under the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act, the federal transparency law designed to put exactly this kind of representation on the record. DCI is engaged for five months at $250,000 per month, reporting to the Permanent Secretary in the Office of the Prime Minister. Stone is a part-time subcontractor inside that contract. Total cost: $1.25 million over five months.

Anyone treating this as a vanity hire has not been paying attention. Eighty-five percent of the 11.2 million visitors who came to The Bahamas in 2024 came from the United States. Tourism is roughly 70 percent of our GDP. That is the relationship being managed — and in the last fifteen months it has been tested as severely as at any point in a generation. The public dispute over the $195 million Chinese-financed specialty hospital. The 10 percent reciprocal tariff on Bahamian exports. The Southern District of New York federal indictment of senior Royal Bahamas Police Force and Defence Force officers. Pressure on Cuban medical-worker arrangements. A request, declined, that we accept third-country deportees. Repeated travel advisories tied to crime in Nassau.

Any one of these files, mishandled, costs the Bahamian economy multiples of the entire DCI retainer.
And every other Caribbean country has made the same calculation. Haiti, Guyana, the Dominican Republic, Kenya — all retained Trump-aligned Washington firms in 2025. Nigeria retained DCI itself for $9 million over one year, more than seven times the annualised Bahamian rate. Against that backdrop, $1.25 million over five months is the bottom of the market.

On Stone himself, the criticism deserves a straight answer. He was convicted in 2019 of seven federal felonies. He was pardoned in full by the President in December 2020. He is licensed to register and lobby, and his filings transparently disclose his record. The question for The Bahamas is functional: does retaining him advance the national interest? With Trump back in the White House and access flowing through a circle of decades-long advisers, the honest answer is yes. A government that refused on principle to engage effective intermediaries to that circle would be choosing domestic political comfort over national interests. That is not statecraft. That is performance.

The Bahamas has been here before. In the mid-1980s, the Pindling government retained Black, Manafort, Stone & Kelly — the same Stone — under broadly similar circumstances. Despite serious U.S. consideration of an indictment of the Prime Minister himself, Pindling was never charged. OPBAT co-operation continued. The relationship survived because it was managed.

This board will measure the contract on results. By mid-August, Bahamians should be able to ask: Did the tariff posture soften? Did the hospital dispute reach an accommodation? Did the travel advisory hold? If yes, $1.25 million will be one of the cheapest insurance policies any Bahamian government has ever bought.
But the principle — that a small island state with 70 percent of its economy tied to one foreign power must invest seriously in its representation in that capital — is not a partisan question. It is a sovereignty question.
The Bahamas hired the man with the longest line into Donald Trump’s office. In this moment, with these stakes, that is not embarrassment. That is sense.

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