Trump and Long Island: In GOP stronghold of Smithtown, some emerging cracks in economic confidence

In Smithtown, approaching the Trump administration’s 100-day mark, one of the president’s supporters wrestled with his discomfort.

"I'd lie to you if I said I wasn't nervous" about the financial markets, said Guy Caligiuri, the Patio Pizza owner who came to national fame in 2020 after a customer’s threatened boycott over the pizzeria’s Trump flag drew a flattering presidential tweet.

Tariffs, President Donald Trump's signature economic policy, roiled the markets this year, as did his social media posts calling for the Federal Reserve chairman to be fired.

"Hopefully, he's doing the right thing," Caligiuri said.

On matters like cuts to federal agencies and a reversal of "all the DEI," Caligiuri still supports Trump’s agenda enthusiastically and he is willing to give Trump considerable leeway on the economy. "He said, ‘There’s going to be some pain, some suffering, you just got to hang in with me,’ so that’s what I’m doing." 

But the pizzeria’s sales are off this year, for reasons that are unclear, and Caligiuri is invested in stocks, which have wobbled in the face of Trump’s trade wars. A major domestic index, the S&P 500, is down about 6% since Trump took office. Caligiuri figured it might take another six months for the markets to fully rebound.

After 48 years in the pizza business, he said, "I'm relying on that money to be there in my retirement." 

Visiting a Republican stronghold

Smithtown is as close to a Republican redoubt as exists on Long Island. Every election district here pulled for Trump in 2024, some by more than 70% of votes cast. Republicans routinely drub Democrats in local contests and the last time a Democrat was elected to town-wide office was 2005. Median household income is higher here, and unemployment lower, than across much of Long Island.

But in interviews with shoppers, businesspeople and a Smithtown councilman, the economy and the impact of tariffs were salient, even among people who said they were confident the president’s economic policies will eventually succeed.

At Hillside Village shopping center one recent afternoon, Daniel Guire, a retired NYPD officer, said the country was "heading down a road we’re not used to. People are not used to being uncomfortable."

Sometimes, he said, "you have to be uncomfortable to reset an agenda that wasn’t working. ... The stock market and retirement funds are not where they were, but I’m on board with what he’s doing."

Guire said he saw tariffs as part of a strategy to renegotiate trade deals that were unfavorable to the United States and to reduce the national debt. He said he was hopeful, too, that Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth would "do a really good job with making our soldiers proud again to be in the U.S. military," reversing equity and inclusion policies he said were examples of the institution "bending over backwards for the far, far left."

Another shopper, Christina Carboine, a litigation manager for an insurance company, said 100 days was not enough time to judge Trump's performance, but that she was unsettled after the drop in the markets caused much of a sizable investment she made near the start of the year to evaporate.

"I’m a little nervous about where this country is headed right now," she said. "Did I feel like a change was needed? Yes, I did, but it seems like there’s an awful lot of upheaval." 

She worried about her retirement plans and about a daughter who plans to marry this year. 

"I worry for her and her future husband," she said. "Are they going to be able to afford a home and be able to live on Long Island?"

According to the nonpartisan Budget Lab at Yale, Trump's tariff levels are the highest in the United States in more than a century and will cost American households an average of $2,600 annually after consumers shift their buying patterns. The White House has said tariffs are intended to force other countries to halt the flow of illegal immigrants and fentanyl into the United States, to address trade imbalances and to restore domestic manufacturing. Trump imposed, then delayed for 90 days, high taxes on imports from dozens of countries, leaving in place a 10% tax on imports from most. Taxes as high as 145% on some Chinese goods remain in place. 

Joe Campolo, a business lawyer and former chairman of the board of HIA-LI, a group that stewards the Long Island Innovation Park at Hauppauge, whose 1,300 companies undergird the town’s commercial tax base, said some companies he advises are "moving a little more slowly than they normally would." But none, he said, have halted investment in response to tariffs.

"The biggest part of my day is now spent trying to discuss with business owners what is going to be the impact of the tariffs," Campolo said. "If the policy goes as [Trump] is planning, we’ll have low inflation, lower interest rates, the market’s going to be stronger and we’ll have less of a trade deficit with other countries ... If it works out, not just our innovation park but all manufacturing in this country is going to be in a much stronger place than before."

Campolo said it felt like "a threshold moment for Donald Trump and the Republican Party. He pulled off the greatest comeback in political history. If his economic plan works, he’ll go down in history as one of the greats, and if it fails, I think he’s going to find himself with Democrats as the majority in the House and the Senate, and we all know how that turns out for him."

Poll: Anxiety is up on Long Island

Long Islanders in the aggregate are more anxious than they were at the end of 2024 about the future of the economy and some key expenses like food, according to a Siena College Research Institute poll earlier this month. But the outlook is heavily partisan, Siena pollster Don Levy said.

After last year’s election, he said, Siena’s index of consumer expectations recorded a 14.9-point drop for Democrats and a 24.8-point increase for Republicans, the widest spread since at least the 2008 vote. Already in 2025, Siena’s measurement of concern over prices for items like food and gas jumped 15 points for Democrats and fell 14 points for Republicans.

"They’re buying the same commodity at the same places at the same time," Levy said. "They differed only by which party they adhered to."

On Long Island and nationally, Levy said the "political prism" appeared to be holding, but could be shaken by changes to prices of goods and job security that affect consumers personally. An AP-NORC poll conducted April 17-21 found  more than 60% of Americans disapproved of Trump's handling of the economy and trade policy, though a majority of Republicans approved of his work.

The power of the political prism was in full effect in Hillside on that recent afternoon, when, a few minutes after Guire pronounced the country "moving in the right direction," Jose Rodriguez, a retired IT director from Coram, said it was doing "terribly ... The economy is terrible. The stock market is terrible. The general sense of well-being for Americans is in the toilet."

Rodriguez’s dread went well beyond the vagaries of the S&P. "My family came from Cuba," he said. "I know what a dictatorship is ... This is what [Trump] wants to be. He wants to be a dictator, the all-seeing, all-knowing ruler of the land."

Others shared some of those sentiments. Dante Sasso, a self-defense instructor from Smithtown, said lately he’d avoided even looking at his retirement investments, though he’d noticed some of the training equipment he buys for his business is imported from China and has gotten much more expensive. What bothers him most, he said, is that "everyone’s so angry." He tied that to the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol and blamed Trump.

"I’ve never seen such hatred toward either side in my life," he said.

Tom Lohmann, a retired NYPD officer and current Smithtown councilman, said he had confidence in Trump's economic policies.

"He's all about America. For too long, we helped and defended everybody, provided all the stuff and got nothing in return," Lohmann said.

Lohmann said he knew of one local company, which he declined to name, "putting a pause on plans to see how this shakes out." In a worst-case scenario, that could lead to layoffs, Lohmann said. But Lohmann said he read much of the tumult of the last three months as "the president being the president. He wrote that book, ‘The Art of the Deal.’ I think some of this is huff and puff."