Do we like them?

Do we like Keith Rowley?

Our score: 4 out of 10. No campaign of hate found, but a hard border line, no move on the gay sex law and little documented good in what I could open.

Rowley ran Trinidad and Tobago as prime minister for a decade, and was still in the job in February 2025 when he told an energy conference his speech might be his last as PM. The backstory on his upbringing is thin in what I could open, so I've stuck to what he did in office.

Migration is where he copped the most heat. In November 2020 he said a nation of 1.3 million shouldn't be expected to keep its borders open to a neighbour of 34 million, while also insisting “we do not demonize our migrant neighbors”. A month later his office posted a Facebook post linking the death of a young Trinidadian woman with the drowning of about 20 Venezuelans as “double doses” of grief. The post was deleted after a backlash, and his office said “I regret and apologise to all for the distress caused by the post.”

In February 2022 Coast Guard officers fired on a boat carrying Venezuelan migrants, and a baby was killed. Rowley sympathised with the family, but defended the officers and called the shooting “legal and appropriate”. He also said the borders had to be protected. Where you land depends on whether you read that as backing the border force or as brushing off a baby's death.

On the harm check, nothing in what I found shows him attacking LGBTQ+ people. But in 2016 he told Parliament there were no plans to amend the buggery laws, even as he said the state must protect citizens “regardless of whom they sleep with”. The Privy Council heard the final challenge to the gay sex ban in July 2026, so that law is still sitting there. I found no climate-denial or anti-vax material, though his government pushed hard on gas projects like Dragon.

Since leaving office he has been combative. In July 2025 he said he was held up at an Antigua airport because his name was on an Interpol watch list. Trinidad police said he was not listed, and Persad-Bissessar called his claims “spurious, unfounded, and inflammatory” and said he should apologise. How that was resolved isn't clear from what I read.

The “jamette” row in March 2026 is the latest example of his sharp tongue: it landed as a fresh political clash. In April he described the new government's crime plan as a “rolling state of emergency”. That is a politician's brawl, not a harm call, but it doesn't help the nice side of the ledger.