Is it possible to be an effective Republican senator in the age of Donald Trump? Someone who makes deals and checks the White House – without becoming a political martyr or an ex-Republican? This is the tightrope that Thom Tillis, the senior senator from North Carolina, has been walking for the last two years. He votes like a reliable Republican while talking and maneuvering like a maverick. He’s a caustic critic of many administration officials, all while insisting he just wants to help the president succeed. It’s been a fascinating performance. But now Tillis is heading for the exits, at the sprightly-for-a senator age of 66, after crossing the White House one too many times. As his party faces a potential midterm wipeout, we talked to him about his high wire act, his relationship with President Trump, and whether it’s possible to make the Senate great again.
Sen. Thom Tillis: Around here, if you’re in motion, you’re generally ahead. And if you’re not, then you’re behind.
Keeping up with Thom Tillis on Capitol Hill is not for the faint of heart. He knows the U.S. Capitol inside out: the passageways, staircases, the Capitol subway system, and miles of underground corridors that connect Senators’ offices to the Capitol itself. When reporters manage to interpose themselves, they know they can rely on Tillis for a soundbite:
Reporter: Do you think that Senators even understand A.I.?
Sen. Thom Tillis: No. A lot of them can’t spell it. They just don’t have the experience.
Sometimes those soundbites reflect his beefs with the White House, an escalating series of fights that culminated when Tillis announced he was voting “no” on the One Big Beautiful Bill, arguing it would push too many low income North Carolinians off Medicaid. In response, the president called Tillis “a talker and complainer, not a doer.”
Sen. Thom Tillis: I respect the president. I still feel like we have an odd relationship, where I’ve clearly made him angry. But it took years before he even made the first negative comment about me. But I react to anybody on this earth the same way. If you come at me with what I think is unfair or incorrect data I’m going to come back after you.
The president threatened to find a primary challenger to run against Tillis. The senator announced that he would be retiring. Instead of fighting for his seat, Tillis has written an unfiltered, profanity-laced book. The title sounds like it’s taking aim at President Trump.
Sen. Thom Tillis: It’s a little take on Dale Carnegie, but it’s “How to Lose Friends and Antagonize Presidents.”
Ross Douthat: Any presidents in particular?
Sen. Thom Tillis: Well, I mean, the more recent one. But I did a good job of antagonizing Biden and a little bit with Obama back in the day.
But the cover doesn’t feature President Trump. Instead, it features unflattering photos of some of Tillis’ least favorite administration officials. It should be noted that he voted to confirm all of Trump’s Cabinet nominees – including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, a vote he now calls his “biggest regret.”
Ross Douthat: Do you hold him responsible for the struggle in the Iran War? Because you’ve said that you supported the initial decision to go to war.
Sen. Thom Tillis: I’m glad the president went in. You know, I think that they got so caught up after the immense success of the first strike that Hegseth probably didn’t listen to his best military advice and say, “Now we should probably move to a different posture.”
He’s calling for Hegseth to resign. It is not the first time he’s gone after big game in Trump’s Cabinet. Earlier this year, he helped speed Kristi Noem’s departure, when the deportation campaign in Minneapolis led to the deaths of two American citizens — Renee Good and Alex Peretti — at the hands of federal agents.
Sen. Tillis (during Noem hearing): The fact that you can’t admit to a mistake which looks like under investigation is going to prove that Miss Good and Mr. Pretti probably should not have been shot in the face, and in the back!
Sen. Thom Tillis: I’m not very often that angry. But when I’m angry, I believe there’s a reason behind it, and people should listen.
Ross Douthat: What were you thinking then? What had gone wrong with her tenure?
Sen. Thom Tillis: I was thinking about the $200 million that the Department of Homeland Security was spending on an ad campaign with her riding a horse. I was thinking about her calling people that were shot, potentially domestic terrorists. That’s proven not to be true.
Ross Douthat: Why do you think the president picked her?
Sen. Thom Tillis: I think there are some people that are in the Cabinet because, to use the president’s term, “they’re right out of Central Casting.” I think Noem and Hegseth are probably the poster children for men and women who should never have the authority they’ve been granted.
This is the Tillis tightrope walk: talk about how much you want President Trump to succeed, while heaping blame on his advisers and subordinates.
Sen. Thom Tillis: The problem I have with some of the people on the front page of that book and a few others is that they’re not looking around corners for him. Most of the issues that we’re dealing with here have less to do with what he wanted to accomplish but how he went about it.
The president and the senator were reared in very different circumstances. Born in 1960 in Jacksonville, Florida, Tillis was one of six kids. He grew up all over the South, moving nearly every year. His father’s itinerant life kept the family — in his words — “on the economic bubble.”
Sen. Thom Tillis: Depending upon the circumstances, we were, either in a house that we rented, sometimes we owned it, and when things got really spicy we were in a trailer park.
Ross Douthat: Do you think that your background, I don’t know, does it make you different from your colleagues?
Sen. Thom Tillis: Well, you know what? I tell ya what, it’s why I probably react so quickly to this concept of, “We don’t have an affordability problem.” You always have an affordability problem. There’s some segment of our society that always does. But denying it by definition means that you don’t recognize the problem and if you don’t recognize it you’re not solving it.
It’s those bread and butter issues that now threaten Republicans with, in his words, an “electoral bloodbath” in the midterms. But many of his colleagues are still afraid to break with the White House.
Ross Douthat: You say in the book that at least 30 of your Republican colleagues in the Senate expressed reservations, about many of the president’s actions in private.Why can’t, in cases like Hegseth, those 30 turn into five votes against confirmation that gets you a different secretary of defense?
Sen. Thom Tillis: Okay, there are some that just really do not want to bear–
Ross Douthat: They don’t want to put their head out?
Sen. Thom Tillis: They don’t want to bear the weight of the president. I get that. You’re up for reelection? He’ll target you in a primary. And so look, you know what all martyrs have in common? They’re dead. There were probably a few instances where if kind of ripped the bandaid off early then I think we’d have had a lot better midterm environment than we’re confronted with now.
Tillis was first elected to the senate in the 2014 midterms, just before Trump and MAGA took over the GOP.
Ross Douthat: What kinda conservative were you at that moment?
Sen. Thom Tillis: The same conservative I am today, pro-Second Amendment, pro-life, limited government, fiscal restraint. The only difference between me and a lotta people that call themselves true conservatives is I got a long list of things that were ratified and they don’t.
Tillis’ mentor in the Senate was Mitch McConnell. He even named his dog Little Mitch. He was a quick study of parliamentary procedure, vote counting and calculated risk taking. At 66, he seems as fit as anyone on the hill — and as competitive, as we found out waiting by the Senate subway tracks.
Sen. Thom Tillis: Do you, do you think you can jump and clear it?
Ross Douthat: I think so. I think I could.
Sen. Thom Tillis: You want to do it?
Ross Douthat: I’m not in your kind of shape. I mean look …
Sen. Thom Tillis: If you could make it …
Ross Douthat: All right.
Sen. Thom Tillis: If you can’t…
Female voice: Oh my gosh!
There was no way he could resist.
Sen. Thom Tillis: 66!
In the second Trump administration, though, there’s been too little legislative work for an energetic senator. Every recent White House, Tillis complains, has been eager to govern by executive order — but Trump 2.0 has been especially imperial.
Ross Douthat: What don’t they understand about the Senate and Congress
Sen. Thom Tillis: That we’re a coequal branch. And they’re at our best when they treat us like a peer.
Ross Douthat: But this runs both ways, right? That they’re more likely to treat you as a coequal branch if you act like a coequal branch. Do you think the Republican Senate in Trump 2.0 has acted like a coequal branch?
Sen. Thom Tillis: I think in some cases yes. In most cases no. And I would say the same thing for Democratic-controlled Senate under Biden and Obama. Look, we always make the mistake when our guy’s in office of conveying power to the White House. And I’ve had a real problem with that because it almost always comes back to bite you.
Another thing that’s come back to bite Republican senators, repeatedly, is the president’s own words. As much as Tillis trains his fire on Trump’s advisers, he also acknowledges what he calls Trump’s “W-T-F moments” … threatening to seize Greenland … casting himself as Jesus … or Easter day musings about annihilating Iran.
Sen. Thom Tillis: I think he said, “Open the f***ing strait”
Ross Douthat: Were you worried that we were going to start carpet bombing Iranian civilians?
Sen. Thom Tillis: No. And I’ve told the president this before. “I think you really need to understand the weight of your words and how literally people take you.”
Ross Douthat: But how do you tell the difference between what people are supposed to take literally and what they aren’t?
Sen. Thom Tillis: You know, I’d like to think that most of the time the president would be surrounded with people who would finally say, “Mr. President, if you do that, I’m walking out this door.”
Ross Douthat: There’s a Russian expression. “If only the tsar knew.” Which means people don’t want to blame the tsar when bad things happen. They want to blame his advisors. But in this case, with Trump, it’s on him, right, in the end. Whoever he has around him — he’s the czar.
Sen. Thom Tillis: Truman famously said that, “The buck stops here.” I get that–
Ross Douthat: It’s a good line.
Sen. Thom Tillis: I get that. But Truman had great advisers.
The Tillis balancing act extends to the events of Jan. 6, 2021. He’s still angry in a way that stands out among his Republican colleagues.
Sen. Thom Tillis: Look, this was the first time in the history of this country that we had not had a completely peaceful transfer of power on that day. And that was despicable. The people that led the charge, the people that assaulted police officers, I wish they were still in prison and serving a very long sentence.
Ross Douthat: But they were there for the president.
Sen. Thom Tillis: Yeah, I think so. I found it disgusting.
But he wasn’t disgusted enough to convict Trump in the impeachment trial. He says it was because the process was rushed and unsenatorial.
Ross Douthat: I read your book and one of your themes was that senators need leverage. This was a moment when you, as a Republican senator, and your colleagues you had all the leverage over him. You had the power to make sure he wasn’t president again.
Sen. Thom Tillis: Yeah but what you’re doin’ is a means justifies the end rationalization. So cheapening the impeachment process to prevent somebody from running in the future, I just don’t buy it.
Ross Douthat: We’re about to have a midterm election. Do you have any concerns about how this same president, who you’ve been condemning for Jan. 6 will react if Republicans have a bad night in the midterms?
Sen. Thom Tillis: I think there’s a risk. I really do. It would be another political unforced error if we do that.
Earlier this year, Tillis used his parliamentary skills to circumvent the speaker of the House and get a long-promised plaque installed honoring the Capitol police and other officers for protecting Congress that day. It’s mounted by the door that presidents take to deliver their inaugural addresses — and hand over power. As we made our way out onto that terrace, Tillis told us he hopes the plaque will be a reminder, and a warning — even if the current president seems unchastened.
Ross Douthat: You talk a lot in your book about the risks of authoritarianism. What are you worried about?
Sen. Thom Tillis: The executive branch, with its outsized influence, threatening people in primaries, basically degrading their independence or eliminating it all together, then we become a one-institution country, which is exactly what we fought a Revolutionary War over. I mean, we will have a sort of dictator king if we’re not careful.
Ross Douthat: It seems like there’s a step change where presidents just ignore Congress or don’t even try and get things passed.
Sen. Thom Tillis: Oh, I agree. And all we’ve seen over the last four administrations is a constant escalation. I want checks and balances. I want all three branches to have their individual role and continue to check power as they have for 250 years. And I think because we’ve been such a successful democracy for so long, it’s hard for the American people to understand how quickly we can lose it all.
Produced by Graham Messick. Associate producer, Alex Ortiz. Broadcast associates, Paloma Vigil and Novi Zhukovsky. Edited by Michael Mongulla. Assistant editor, Aisha Crespo
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