Tillis Warns of Executive Overreach While Exiting Senate

Thom Tillis is leaving the Senate at 66, and he's leaving angry. The North Carolina Republican has spent the last two years performing an exhausting act: voting with his party while criticizing the White House, backing Cabinet nominees he now calls catastrophic mistakes, and insisting all the while that he simply wants the president to succeed. That tightrope finally snapped. After crossing the White House one too many times—most recently by voting against a major spending bill over Medicaid concerns—Tillis announced his retirement rather than face a primary challenge. Now, with his seat no longer at stake, he's written a book with a title that says what he's been thinking: "How to Lose Friends and Antagonize Presidents."

The book's cover features not Donald Trump but the administration officials Tillis considers the worst offenders. He voted to confirm all of Trump's Cabinet picks, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a decision he now calls his biggest regret. When the war effort stalled after an initial military success, Tillis believes Hegseth stopped listening to his best military advisers and shifted strategy poorly. He's calling for Hegseth's resignation. Earlier this year, Tillis helped accelerate the departure of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem after a deportation campaign in Minneapolis resulted in the deaths of two American citizens, Renee Good and Alex Peretti, at the hands of federal agents. During her confirmation hearing, Tillis was visibly furious, demanding she acknowledge what he saw as a fatal mistake. He was thinking about the $200 million the department spent on an advertising campaign featuring Noem on horseback, and about her characterizing the shooting victims as potential domestic terrorists—a claim that proved false.

Tillis frames his criticism as concern for the president's own interests. The real problem, he argues, isn't what Trump wants to accomplish but how his advisers help him accomplish it. People like Noem and Hegseth, in Tillis's view, were selected because they looked the part—"right out of Central Casting," as Trump himself might say—rather than because they possessed the judgment the positions demanded. They weren't, in Tillis's phrase, "looking around corners" for the president. But this framing obscures a deeper complaint: Tillis is watching the executive branch consolidate power in ways he believes threaten the constitutional order itself.

Growing up in Jacksonville, Florida, one of six children in a family that moved nearly every year, Tillis lived on what he calls "the economic bubble." Some years his family owned a house; other years they rented; when money got tight, they lived in a trailer park. That background shaped how he thinks about policy. When administration officials dismiss concerns about affordability, Tillis bristles. There's always an affordability problem for some segment of society, he insists. Deny it and you don't solve it. It's this bread-and-butter focus that makes him worry Republicans face an "electoral bloodbath" in the midterms. Yet many of his colleagues remain silent. In his book, Tillis notes that at least 30 Republican senators have privately expressed reservations about the president's actions. When pressed on why those 30 don't become five votes against confirmation on someone like Hegseth, Tillis is blunt: they fear primary challenges. "All martyrs have one thing in common," he says. "They're dead." A few early breaks with the White House, he believes, might have created a better midterm environment. Instead, Republicans have largely ceded ground.

Tillis acknowledges the president's more alarming moments—what he calls "W-T-F moments." Trump has threatened to seize Greenland, mused about annihilating Iran, and made other statements that alarmed allies and adversaries alike. Tillis has told the president directly that he needs to understand the weight of his words, how literally people take them. But when pressed on how to distinguish between what should be taken literally and what shouldn't, Tillis circles back to the same complaint: the president needs advisers willing to walk out the door if he's about to do something catastrophic. The problem is structural, not personal.

On January 6th, Tillis stands out among Republican senators for his continued anger. He calls the breach of the Capitol "despicable" and wishes those who assaulted police officers were still in prison. Yet he voted to acquit Trump in the impeachment trial, arguing the process was rushed and unsenatorial. When asked why he didn't use the leverage Republicans had in that moment to prevent Trump from running again, Tillis rejects the premise. Convicting the president to achieve a political outcome would cheapen impeachment itself. Still, he worries about what might happen if Republicans have a bad night in the midterms. The president's reaction could be "another political unforced error."

Earlier this year, using his deep knowledge of Senate procedure, Tillis circumvented the House speaker to install a plaque honoring Capitol Police and other officers who protected Congress that day. It's mounted by the door through which presidents pass to deliver inaugural addresses—the moment power changes hands. Tillis hopes it serves as a reminder and a warning. His real concern, though, runs deeper. The executive branch, he argues, has accumulated outsized influence. Presidents threaten senators in primaries, degrading their independence or eliminating it altogether. "We become a one-institution country," Tillis says, "which is exactly what we fought a Revolutionary War over." Every recent administration has escalated executive power. Trump's is simply the latest iteration. After 250 years of successful democracy, Americans have grown complacent about how quickly it can be lost. Tillis is leaving the Senate convinced that without meaningful checks and balances—without all three branches playing their constitutional role—the country risks something it has never faced: a genuine threat to the system itself.