A Partisan’s Progress

By John McCormack

Monday, October 19, 2026

 

In Thom Tillis’ new book, How to Lose Friends and Antagonize Presidents, the two-term senator with little more than two months until his retirement dismisses “lazy reporters” who say he was only willing to speak out against President Trump’s excesses once he decided to retire in June 2025. But Tillis concedes he did become more outspoken after announcing his retirement.

 

“Now that I wasn’t quite as concerned about having to answer for my every statement during the next election cycle,” Tillis writes, “I’ll admit that the number of f—s I had to give did diminish pretty quickly.”

 

One of the more surprising elements of the seemingly mild-mannered senator’s book is that if it were a movie, it would merit an R-rating for language. Executive overreach is "bad because it doesn’t f—ing work,” Tillis writes, without the polite dashes. Partisans who win a trifecta—the White House plus both chambers of Congress—think they had a mandate only to realize two years later that voters “simply gave them a chance to govern after the other guys f—ed it up.”

 

“It’s not a children’s book,” Tillis tells me in an interview. “It’s an after-action [report] from a Price Waterhouse partner who grew up at a trailer park.”

 

The 17 f-bombs in How to Lose Friends and Antagonize Presidents are less surprising when he reveals toward the end of the book that he’s “always liked” the foul-mouthed band Sublime. When I tell Tillis nothing has ever made me feel older than reading that a retiring two-term (Medicare-eligible) senator was always a fan of a band popular when I was in junior high, he replies: “Come on, man! I went to a Nine Inch Nails concert. All these young people like to hijack them, but they started in 1989.” The math, alas, checks out.

 

***

 

Thom Tillis is an odd duck in more ways than one. His book focuses on his fraught relationship with the second Trump administration, and the villains in his story are the sycophantic supporters and advisers who have led Trump astray, rather than Trump himself. Tillis calls these sycophants “MAGATS,” sounding a bit like a #Resistance influencer. But he remains a committed Trump-era Republican: He tells me he has no regrets about voting against convicting Trump in his second impeachment trial in 2021 or supporting Trump for president in 2024, and he wants every Republican Senate and House candidate to win in 2026.

 

“I am writing this book to save my party from itself, and to save the president from the temptations and tragedies being set upon him from MAGA extremists like [Laura] Loomer and [Steve] Bannon who have no understanding of governance, politics, or simple human decency,” Tillis explains at the outset of his book. “There’s nothing conservative about setting up a $1.776 billion fund for scumbags who beat on cops and stormed the Capitol. There’s nothing conservative about spending millions on TV commercials while your ICE thugs gun people down in the streets, or starting investigations of your Fed chair because he won’t fall in line like all the other spineless lowlifes who work for you.”

 

The story is, in many ways, about how most of the human guardrails of the first Trump administration—people like John Kelly, Bill Barr, and Henry McMaster—went away, only to be supplanted by people like Pete Hegseth, Kristi Noem, and Stephen Miller. It’s the tale of how even a faithful Republican like Tillis found himself breaking with Trump.

 

“I know for a fact that there are others like me: Republicans who agreed to go along with the early demands of the Trump team no matter how ridiculous they were, believing that failing to do so would mean the end of their political career, and who now see that things have gone way too far,” Tillis writes.

 

Tillis had several breaking points with the Trump administration. He split with Trump over the size of healthcare spending cuts in the “big beautiful bill” and promptly announced his retirement as the fight with Trump went public. The bill passed anyway. He was one of many Republican senators who helped prevent Matt Gaetz from becoming attorney general, and he got a promise (of dubious worth) to kill off a $1.776 billion slush fund for Trump allies allegedly victimized by government “weaponization.”

 

Just last week, Tillis was one of six Republican senators to sign a bipartisan letter to Trump saying that an executive action to allow Russia to sell diesel fuel was “a gift to our adversary and a betrayal of our Allies; it should be rescinded.” Trump proceeded this weekend to broadly waive Russia sanctions—covering banking, tariffs, and more—in the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia Act that passed the Senate 86-11 this summer. Tillis wrote on social media that it’s “unconscionable that this administration is capitulating to a Russian dictator who illegally invaded Ukraine and butchers innocent civilians every single day.” It remains to be seen whether the bipartisan backlash will have any effect on Trump’s Russia-Ukraine policy.

 

Tillis did successfully play the role of human guardrail at one key moment, when he thwarted MAGA lawfare against Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell. Within minutes of the Trump Department of Justice announcing in January 2026 a criminal probe into Powell that was obviously politically motivated (Trump wanted lower interest rates), Tillis announced that he would use his decisive vote on the Senate Banking Committee to block “the confirmation of any nominee for the Fed—including the upcoming Fed Chair vacancy—until this legal matter is fully resolved.” The subpoenas of Powell were later quashed.

 

“Tillis was absolutely critical,” Jason Furman, a former top economic adviser to President Barack Obama, told me shortly after the Powell investigation was announced. “Once he said that, to me it seemed like this had all backfired.” Tillis told me that he heard from Powell’s team that the subpoenas were imminent and told his own team to help him prepare to publish a statement. “I’m not going to let the markets open, thinking that the Fed has suddenly become just the Department of the White House,” he said. “I think it could have had devastating consequences.”

 

Yet, time and again, Tillis places most of the blame for disasters and potential disasters on Trump’s advisers, not Trump himself. In the book, Tillis blames budget chief Russ Vought for devising the Powell scheme. He blames Kristi Noem and Stephen Miller for the aggressive quota-driven deportation agenda that set the stage for the shooting deaths of two Americans in Minnesota. When Trump issued a blanket pardon for January 6 rioters, including those who viciously beat up police officers, Tillis writes: “That disgusted me. I’m sure this was yet another idea whispered into his ear by some White House toady, and if I ever find out who that person was, I’m going to shout his or her name from the rooftops.”

 

When I ask Tillis if he thinks he’s letting Trump off the hook by blaming Trump’s advisers for so many of Trump’s actions, he replies with an emphatic “No!”

 

“President Trump is a great salesperson,” he continues. “Do you think that President Trump got elected because [voters] said, ‘Man, that dude’s depth of knowledge in geopolitical affairs, or healthcare, or homeland security, or transportation—you know, he’s a real expert there.’ No, if you’re an executive, you hire experts there and you listen to them.”

 

“And here’s the other reality: You can fire advisers. You can’t fire the president,” he adds. “My focus is on getting the people out of there who actually expose the president to what is ultimately his responsibility.”

 

Critics will, of course, note that Tillis voted to confirm Trump’s worst Cabinet members. He writes that he wishes he hadn’t voted to confirm Robert F. Kennedy as health and human Services secretary, and his biggest regret of all was casting a decisive vote to confirm Pete Hegseth to run the Pentagon. Tillis is pushing hard now for Trump to fire Hegseth. In his interview, the senator castigated Hegseth for the “bull—” plan (reversed by the White House) to broadcast the execution of a convicted terrorist and mass murderer. He said the Trump administration’s policy of bombing unarmed suspected drug boats seems like "just another one of Pete Hegseth’s Homelander-like aggressive tactics that appeal to a lot of the more primitive desires that we have."

 

“Since I’m not in the committee of jurisdiction, I just haven’t spent a lot of time on that, but intuitively, I think history is not going to look fondly at ... what are basically summary executions,” he added, when asked why he didn’t address the controversy in his book. “My guess is they’ve killed some people that didn’t want to be on that boat, and maybe even killed some people that were not carrying any kind of [drug] payloads, let alone the kind that they’ve described.” Tillis called for more congressional investigations of the strikes, but he did not vote in favor of a war powers resolution aimed at stopping them.

 

Tillis’s selective breaks with Trump are unlikely to satisfy many Trump critics. Even after his declaration of independence from Trump in June 2025, he voted to confirm Trump lackeys Emil Bove and Todd Blanche (both of whom previously served as Trump’s personal lawyers) to high-ranking positions, Bove as federal appeals court judge and Blanche as attorney general. Tillis has no regrets about either vote: He tells me he didn’t want to leave the appeals court seat vacant, and he publicly pointed to Blanche’s pledge to kill off the $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund as a rationale to confirm him.

 

Although Tillis may not have the ability to fire Trump, he and his Republican Senate colleagues did have the opportunity in 2021 to render Trump ineligible to seek the presidency ever again. But the vote to convict Trump in his second impeachment trial fell 10 votes short of the two-thirds majority necessary. Tillis defends his “nay” vote by saying that the House failed to provide due process to Trump by declining to call witnesses during the impeachment trial. “It was a snap impeachment, and I think it was in the heat of the moment, and that by itself is a challenge to the integrity of our institution,” he says.

 

Tillis says institutional concerns are also at the heart of why he remains a committed Republican. Asked why he thinks GOP control of the Senate is so important that he’d even vote for Ken Paxton if he lived in Texas, he tells me he doesn’t want gridlock for the next two years, and he fears unchecked Democratic governance after 2028: “I worry about the Democrats ultimately nuking the filibuster, admitting [new] states, expanding the Supreme Court.”

 

Republican opponents of the filibuster also come under fire in Tillis’ book. He singles out Mike Lee, his Republican colleague from Utah, for flipping in favor of nuking the filibuster in order to pass the SAVE ACT. Tillis writes that Lee is “just pretending” he no longer understands the importance of the Senate’s 60-vote rule and Lee is “doing it because he, along with many other members of the Republican Party in the Senate, believes that making President Trump happy in the moment is more important than safeguarding his legacy (and the legacy of the Republican Party) for years to come.”

 

When I ask Tillis how he knows Lee hasn’t sincerely changed his mind about the filibuster, Tillis points to a 2022 speech Lee gave when Senate Democrats came two votes short of scrapping the filibuster: “I think the minute we fall out of power that he’ll dust off that 2022 speech and wax eloquent again. But he’s lost all credibility, in my opinion, by doing exactly what the Democrats did” in flip-flopping on the filibuster.

 

None of Tillis’ fights with Trump and his allies rank among his proudest moments in office. His top achievements in Congress, Tillis writes, are getting federal tribal recognition for the Lumbee Indians; securing compensation for victims sterilized in a eugenics program in North Carolina; and helping to free a Chrisitan pastor imprisoned in Turkey.

 

Though Tillis wants the GOP to hold the Senate in November, he realizes Republicans are in a difficult spot because they are wedded to a deeply unpopular president. Polls indicate Tillis’ seat is very likely to be filled by Democratic candidate and former Gov. Roy Cooper, and Tillis isn’t sure if he could have pulled out a victory if he were on the ballot.* “I think it would be closer, and I believe that it would be in reach, but it would be dependent upon the extent to which I could move unaffiliated voters to our column,” he says. Republican Senate candidate Michael Whatley “is going to have a more difficult time because at this point I’m not sure of any separation between him and the president.”

 

Is there anything Trump could actually do to help Republicans in the closing two weeks of the campaign? “What the president can do is not hurt Republicans,” he says. “Let’s just avoid any more unforced errors, and then maybe even give some of these candidates the latitude to separate from the president when they genuinely believe it.”

 

Whatever the outcome may be in November, Tillis says he hopes to be around to help the Republican Party long after he and Trump are out of office. But he concedes in the book he may not have much influence come January. “Ex-senators are as important to people as spoiled milk,” Tillis writes. “My expiration date is fast approaching.”