Shunned, stared at, still for Trump: The holdout in Hillary Clinton’s town

CHAPPAQUA, N.Y. >> First came the grimaces — the disbelieving eyes trained upon his shirt, his signs, his car window stickers broadcasting a local betrayal.

Then his teenage son refused to drive the family car without redecorating, hiding the three “Make America Great Again” hats that usually sit atop the dashboard.

And there are deeper indignities still — more piercing than any parking lot glowering or dinner table slight — when John Nadler feels the full weight of his status as America’s loneliest supporter of Donald Trump: Acquaintances in the hometown Nadler has known for nearly three decades will not look him in the eye.

“People I’ve known for years,” Nadler, 63, said. “Just nod or wink or something. Anything.”

Across the country, every election introduces a measure of neighborly strain. Allegiances splinter. Eyes roll. Conversations curdle.

But Nadler’s case is unique. His neighbors include Bill and Hillary Clinton, perched behind a white fence about a mile away on Old House Lane. And the town is proud, and fiercely protective, of its most famous residents.

“We love her,” said Dawn Greenberg, the founder of Chappaqua Friends of Hillary, before adding a Clintonian hedge. “She reportedly loves us back.”

Nadler is unmoved, focusing his daily energies almost exclusively on helping to defeat Hillary Clinton and extolling her opponent’s virtues.

He was jeered last month at the town’s beloved Memorial Day parade, where the Clintons marched to warm applause. Nadler abandoned his plan to approach the former president and ask him to put on a Trump hat.

He has taken local administrators to task for prominently displaying images of the Clintons on the town website.

He has founded an opposition group on Facebook, “Neighbors of Hillary Clinton in Chappaqua for Donald Trump for President,” whose hundreds of members mostly live elsewhere.

His connection to the candidate, he said, was unmistakable.

“We have a symbiotic understanding, Trump and I,” he said. “It’s spooky in a way.”

It is an admiration fostered over many decades. Trained in engineering and building construction, Nadler — a Bronx native who shuns the “boootiques” of Chappaqua, but not the accent of his youth — has followed Trump’s career since the 1970s, dazzled by his redevelopment of the Commodore Hotel (now the Grand Hyatt) in Midtown Manhattan.

He tracked Trump’s ups and downs, personal and professional, in the news. He never missed an episode of “The Apprentice.”

Nadler, with thinning hair and an iced tea stain on his white polo shirt, was once something of a hippie, playing folk music in Central Park as a teenager and identifying most strongly with Democrats like the Kennedys. He never took to the Clintons, though he said the former president was gracious once when Nadler introduced himself and his son at a supermarket.

“He could charm the pants off a snake,” Nadler said.

Speaking from his back porch, Nadler described a lifetime of hard and often physical labor, interrupted in recent years after a fall from a ladder that left him with a broken hip.

Trump, he said, is the candidate he has been waiting for. He identified several parallels between himself and the presumptive Republican nominee.

There is rhetorical strategy: “He has exaggerated to compensate for people who don’t like him,” Nadler said. “I do that too.”

There is the nose for deal-making: “Being in construction, I’ve negotiated,” he reasoned.

And when Trump announced his bid last year, railing against undocumented immigrants and promising a wall, Nadler marveled at how similar their instincts were.

“A lot of things, I said. I mentioned ISIS. I mentioned Obama with refugees and illegals,” Nadler said.

Seeking an analogy, Nadler invoked the 1988 movie “Twins,” the story of physically mismatched brothers separated at birth. (Nadler is the Danny DeVito character, in his telling, with Trump as Arnold Schwarzenegger.)

Across town, where Nadler has long earned a reputation as a gadfly, he has found little solidarity.

Along almost every stretch of this exclusive hamlet, there is a Clinton story — the injured boy whose cast was signed by Bill Clinton, the salon on King Street that styles Hillary Clinton’s hair, the time a little girl chased the Clinton family dog into the back of a security vehicle.

Locals cheer the famous family at Lange’s Little Store and Delicatessen, where Bill Clinton is known to prefer fruit salad and a honey bran muffin, and at Hip-Kid boutique, which keeps a “Hillary” sign tucked discreetly beneath the register.

Democrats enjoy an overwhelming voter registration advantage in the upscale ZIP code. And since the Clintons purchased their home in 1999, even many voters who lean right like Nadler have come to appreciate the couple’s affection for this woodsy patch of New York real estate and its quaint downtown, some 35 miles from the city.

“Not everybody wears their politics on their sleeve,” said Robert J. Greenstein, the town supervisor for New Castle, which includes Chappaqua. “He tends to.”

The rest of Nadler’s family is less vocal. His wife, Maria, has embraced Trump, if not her husband’s dedication, which has elevated his status in several Trump-centric Facebook groups and online chats.

“My infamous husband,” sighed Maria Nadler, a teacher. “It’s consumed a lot of his time.”

Her most daring act of political protest came at a diner, she said, when she flashed a menacing glare at Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who lives in nearby Mount Kisco and supports Hillary Clinton.

Stephen Nadler, 17, the youngest of their three children, remains the home’s chief Trump skeptic.

“I find it hard to believe the side that says he’s very intelligent,” he said from the front seat recently, with his father driving.

“He has a 156 IQ!” John Nadler shot back. His source was not immediately clear.

The teenager said the family’s Chevy Tahoe is now more famous than its owner, appearing often in the Snapchat videos of high school friends who are surprised at its trimmings. Nadler has glued some of his pro-Trump stickers to the back window to prevent theft.

Another aesthetic choice — Nadler’s plot to frame and hang a Trump sign inside the house — was felled by spousal veto.

Surely, Maria Nadler said, there are other Trump supporters among the 1,400-odd residents of Chappaqua. But they have remained, perhaps wisely, a virtually silent minority.

“We’re quiet,” she said. “Except for John.”