Few Republican senators give a better floor speech than Thom Tillis of North Carolina does. He’s the Daniel Day-Lewis of moral outrage. He delivered a doozy last month, challenging President Trump’s revisionist history of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and calling Vladimir Putin “a liar, a murderer” and “the greatest threat to democracy in my lifetime.”
But Tulsi Gabbard is apparently no threat at all. Although she has been something of a Putin apologist, Tillis fell in line with 51 of his Republican colleagues in the Senate and voted to confirm her as director of national intelligence. Afterward, on Facebook, he proclaimed his pride in supporting her.
He made impassioned remarks in the Senate about his disagreement with Trump’s pardons of Jan. 6 rioters who bloodied law enforcement officers.
But the following month, he voted to confirm Kash Patel, who has peddled the kinds of fictions that fueled that violence, as director of the F.B.I.
Courage, capitulation — Tillis pinballs dizzyingly between the two. As he gears up for a 2026 campaign for a third term in the Senate, he seems to be at war with himself. And perhaps more poignantly than any other Republican on Capitol Hill, Tillis, 64, illustrates how hard it is to be principled, independent or any of those other bygone adjectives in Trump’s Republican Party.
That’s a compliment. For most Republicans in Congress, there’s no battle between conscience and supplication. They dropped to their knees years ago. There’s no tension between what they say and what they do. They praise Trump with their every word, including the conjunctions.
Tillis was supposed to be different, a possible pox on Trump’s most outrageous nominees for key administration positions. But he has voted for them all — the good, the bad, the unfathomable, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Maybe he really thinks that’s the right thing to do. Maybe he’s just at Trump’s mercy. Trump angers quickly, has a thirst for vengeance and has made clear that he can punish Republicans who cross him by backing opponents in their primaries. For Tillis, who already has a tense relationship with North Carolina’s increasingly right-wing Republicans, that might be disastrous.
“On a human level, he’s a sympathetic figure, trying to figure out how to survive politically,” Cal Cunningham, the prominent North Carolina Democrat who narrowly lost to Tillis in the state’s 2020 Senate race, told me. Since their face-off, Cunningham and Tillis have maintained a friendship; Cunningham said that he respects Tillis as someone earnestly interested in how to govern “a very divided, cacophonous country.” But, he added, “the rub is that our founders wrote into the architecture of this country that we would have a Senate, with six-year terms, to stand up to an abusive executive.”
Tillis wobbles. In the run-up to the Senate’s vote to confirm Pete Hegseth as defense secretary, according to detailed accounts in both The Times and The Wall Street Journal, Tillis privately expressed serious misgivings about Hegseth’s character and worked vigorously behind the scenes to scuttle the nomination before the full Senate had to consider it. He failed.
On the day of decision, three Republican senators — Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and Mitch McConnell — voted no. Had Tillis joined them, Hegseth wouldn’t have been confirmed. Instead, Tillis did as Trump wanted. The Times reported that in the hours before the vote, Trump welcomed a group of North Carolina lawmakers aboard Air Force One and “noted Mr. Tillis’s impending defection.” Trump then asked if any of them wanted his endorsement for a primary challenge to Tillis.
What’s so sad about Tillis in the present is what moxie he showed in the past.
“He has put himself out there numerous times to do what’s right,” said Sarah Treul Roberts, a professor of political science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. During the Biden administration, Tillis bucked his party and crossed the aisle to join forces with Democrats on gun-safety legislation, on infrastructure spending, on same-sex marriage. He got attention and plaudits for being an outlier among the Republican toadies of the Trump age, and he seemed to relish that role, even as it earned him a formal censure from the North Carolina Republican Party. Cunningham and other political insiders who have observed Tillis for decades, going back to his years in North Carolina’s General Assembly, say that he’s a practical, progress-minded lawmaker at heart.
“He could have been a good and maybe even great senator in an earlier age, when bipartisan deal making was rewarded,” said Asher Hildebrand, one of my colleagues at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy. “But in an age when loyalty is the only thing, he has to shrink away from greatness — or at least the type of greatness he may have imagined when he took the job.”
Tillis’s backers say that he hasn’t changed; circumstances have. He wants to be in the mix, and he wants to solve problems, so when Joe Biden was president and Democrats were in the majority, he worked with them. Now Trump is back in the White House, and Republicans control both chambers of Congress; he’ll extend them the same courtesy. “It’s not about independence,” Paul Shumaker, Tillis’s longtime chief political adviser, told me. “What he has always said is that we need outcomes.”
“He is going to support President Trump’s nominees,” said Daniel Keylin, a spokesman for Tillis. “But he’s also bipartisan, and he also voted for the majority of President Biden’s nominees.” Keylin said that Tillis isn’t frightened of a primary challenge, has “a good relationship” with Trump and, despite that censure, “has not backed away from a single piece of bipartisan legislation that he has worked to pass.”
But there’s no way Tillis’s Senate race isn’t weighing heavily on him. It’s shaping up to be one of the most closely watched and bitterly fought midterm contests, and it’s already a psychodrama all its own. After a recent poll showed Tillis with a 25 percent approval rating among North Carolinians, an adviser to Donald Trump Jr., Arthur Schwartz, posted on X: “We’re going to need a new senate candidate in NC unless we want to hand the gavel back to Schumer.”
That’s more than a bit alarmist — any coolheaded appraisal of the Senate map in 2026 suggests terrain so favorable to Republicans that they could lose North Carolina and still hold on to the Senate majority. Besides, North Carolina is on the reddish side of purple and, by some measures, has grown more favorable to Republicans since Tillis’s first election to the Senate in 2014. No Democrat has prevailed in a Senate contest in the state since 2008. Trump won North Carolina in 2016, 2020 and 2024.
But Schwartz’s swipe at Tillis suggests the furious crosscurrents that the senator is navigating. The MAGA faithful want him to fawn over Trump, but that could be deadly in a general election, given that more than one-third of North Carolina voters aren’t registered as either Republicans or Democrats. And the Democratic nominee could be Roy Cooper, the state’s term-limited governor from 2017 to 2025, who is still mulling the Senate race.
“We don’t see many incumbent senators lose,” David McLennan, a political scientist at Meredith College in Raleigh, N.C., told me. “But it’d be tough headwinds for Tillis if Cooper gets in.”
Tillis, though, is plenty tough himself. Across the political spectrum, there’s consensus on that. A former management consultant, he didn’t enter politics until 2003, when he ran for the Board of Commissioners in his suburb of Charlotte, but he rose quickly from there to the state’s House of Representatives, then to the position of House speaker, then to the U.S. Senate. All the while, he promoted Republican priorities without being or seeming wholly bound by them. “He’s business-minded and a reliable conservative but doesn’t go down the crazy-town direction that we’ve often seen from a lot of other folks,” Doug Heye, a former communications director for the Republican National Committee who has worked in North Carolina politics, told me.
Moderation and MAGA are a difficult marriage, and watching Tillis try to reconcile the two is a painful spectacle. He has moments of defiance, such as his sponsorship in 2018 of a bill to protect the special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation from interference from Trump. The following year, he wrote an opinion essay in The Washington Post opposing Trump’s declaration of a national emergency to hasten the building of a border wall. Tillis explained that he had a responsibility “to preserve the separation of powers and to curb the kind of executive overreach that Congress has allowed to fester for the better part of the past century.”
“I stood by that principle during the Obama administration,” he added. “And I stand by it now.”
He initially remained upright in the face of blowback from some Republicans and reiterated his support for a congressional resolution of disapproval for that emergency declaration. “It’s never a tough vote for me when I’m standing on principle,” he told The Washington Post.
Then he sat, voting against that resolution even as 12 other Senate Republicans supported it.
It’s a familiar story. Politicians talk a grand game and then play a lesser one. They yearn to be true to themselves and then realize that’s incompatible with a long career. Tillis presents a Trump-era version of that tale — messier, more disheartening.
During the Senate Judiciary Committee’s confirmation hearing for Pam Bondi as attorney general, he digressed from questioning her to decry the insult of Democrats’ suggestion that she or Trump might support blanket pardons for the Jan. 6 rioters. It seemed important to him to believe that such a scenario was, as he said, “an absurd and unfair hypothetical.”
Five days later, Trump took the oath of office and granted clemency to more than 1,500 Jan. 6 defendants. And Tillis, to his credit, registered his displeasure — in interviews, on the Senate floor.
But his comments were also striking for their hedging and their asterisks. Tillis brought up Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter. Tillis emphasized Democrats’ condoning of violent protests in Kenosha, Wis., after Jacob Blake’s shooting. He mused that maybe the pardons for protesters who didn’t assault police officers were OK. He wondered if Trump got bad advice.
Tillis obviously wanted to state loudly and clearly that what happened to law enforcement officers at the Capitol was impermissible. But a Republican lawmaker can be only so loud and so clear when Trump might be listening.
“I’m reluctant to condemn the way he operates,” David Price, a North Carolina Democrat who retired from the House in 2023, told me, saying that Tillis doesn’t deserve more derision than a Republican who blithely submits to Trump. But Tillis submits nonetheless, and Price said, “You do wonder — how much is too much?”
“That’s the puzzle of the man,” Price added. “When is it not worth it if you have to give up the essence of how you’ve operated and what you believe?”
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