North Carolina’s senior senator is on his way out of Washington, and he is using the exit to argue that Congress has given away too much of its power. Thom Tillis, 66, has labeled many of the advisers around President Trump “sycophants” and has pressed fellow lawmakers to treat the Senate as a co-equal branch rather than a junior partner to the White House, reports CBS News.
The argument runs through his new book, How to Lose Friends and Antagonize Presidents, where he lays out what he calls the “WTF moments” of the second Trump administration. Tillis has served under Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and both Trump presidencies. He said the growing weight of the executive branch is testing the country’s checks and balances, and he put the risk in blunt terms: “We will have a sort of dictator king if we’re not careful.”
He said recent presidents of both parties have leaned on executive orders, and that the pattern has been especially clear in the current administration. In his view, the White House often fails to treat Congress as a peer, and lawmakers fail to insist on that role. “I would say the same thing for Democratic-controlled Senate under Biden and Obama,” he said.
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“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,” he added. Tillis writes in the book about the risks of authoritarianism and describes a “constant escalation” across four administrations of presidents setting Congress aside. He said he wants the three branches to keep the separate roles they have held for generations.
“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,” he said. “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.”
He won his Senate seat in the 2014 midterms, before Mr. Trump and the Make America Great Again movement took over the Republican Party. Tillis said his own politics have not shifted: “pro-Second Amendment, pro-life, limited government, fiscal restraint.”
He drew a line between himself and some who claim the same label. “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,” he said.
The departure follows a run of clashes with the White House. Tillis said the break came in June 2025, when he announced he would oppose Mr. Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act because he believed it would push too many low-income North Carolinians off Medicaid. The president called him “a talker and complainer, not a doer” and threatened to back a primary challenger. Tillis chose retirement over a fight for the seat.
He has described the relationship as strained but not finished. “I respect the president. I still feel like we have an odd relationship, where I’ve clearly made him angry,” he said recently. Details of his profanity-laced private texts with Trump about the decision to retire later became public because Tillis included them in the book. He has also said he is still pressing the White House, including a recent call for Trump to fire Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Tillis voted to confirm every Cabinet nominee in the second Trump administration, Hegseth among them, and he now calls that early vote his “biggest regret.” He said he is glad “the president went in” to Iran, but he thinks officials overreached after the first strike. “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 said.
At a Senate hearing last March, he criticized Department of Homeland Security Advisor Kristi Noem, including her handling of the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. In comments that spread widely, he said, “I was thinking about her calling people that were shot, potentially domestic terrorists.”
He added, “That’s proven not to be true.” The president fired Noem two days later. Tillis later grouped her with Hegseth: “I think Noem and Hegseth are probably the poster children for men and women who should never have the authority they’ve been granted.”
His criticism has also covered Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, whom he faulted for “not looking around corners for” Mr. Trump. Tillis has warned that Congress must act as a co-equal branch, as a House Democrat accused Mr. Trump of withholding Iran war casualty statistics from Congress.
On Jan. 6, 2021, he still calls the Capitol attack and the threat to a peaceful transfer of power “despicable.” He did not vote to convict Mr. Trump in the second impeachment trial after the president left office, saying the process was rushed and politicized. “Cheapening the impeachment process to prevent somebody from running in the future, I just don’t buy it,” he said.
Asked whether a Jan. 6-style reaction is possible if candidates backed by Trump lose in the midterms, Tillis said, “I think there’s a risk. I really do,” and added, “It would be another unforced error if we do that.”
He predicts an “electoral bloodbath” for Republicans, with everyday affordability issues at the center, and he said many colleagues are unwilling to break with the White House. In the book, he writes that at least 30 Republican senators have raised reservations about many of Mr. Trump’s actions, but mostly in private, because they fear a presidential target would end their time in office.
“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,” Tillis said. “There were probably a few instances where if [you] 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.”
Published: Oct 5, 2026 01:45 pm