Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) is exercising his independence from the White House in increasingly forceful terms, using his impending retirement from the Senate to wage a battle over what he says is the future of President Donald Trump’s legacy.
This week, Tillis took one of his clearest steps yet to challenge the administration after the Justice Department decided to criminally investigate Fed Chairman Jerome Powell, releasing a statement vowing to oppose all Federal Reserve nominees until the matter was “fully resolved.”
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The rebuff, in which Tillis questioned whether the investigation was political given Trump’s efforts to push Powell out, was not altogether surprising for Tillis, who has for years been one of the more independent-minded Republicans in the Senate.
Yet Tillis is speaking more freely since he announced he would retire at the end of this year, and especially so this past week. On Wednesday, Tillis delivered a stemwinder of a speech in which he chastised the DOJ, but also Trump’s repeated flirtations with taking over Greenland and embrace of a Bernie Sanders-supported crackdown on credit card companies.
Afterward, Tillis revealed to the Washington Examiner that he has reservations about Trump’s decision to appoint an assistant attorney general for fraud who would report directly to the White House.
Tillis has a simple explanation for the growing points of conflict with the administration: Trump drives the news cycle at a dizzying pace and happened to put out an unusually controversial set of policy prescriptions this week, including a 10% cap on credit card interest rates.
“We’re moving in very short decision cycles now, and so I have to move at the speed that things come,” Tillis said after his speech.
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He could have registered those complaints privately with the president, and insists that he and Trump have a good relationship, but argued that Trump is better served if Republicans speak out publicly on what he believes is bad advice coming from his inner circle.
“When you see all that stuff layering on, then — I prefer shuttle diplomacy, I prefer talking to the president, continuing the communication — but I also feel like you got to put a marker out there when I believe that he’s got advisers that are doing damage to his future legacy.”
Tillis’s decision to criticize Trump’s advisers, rather than the president himself, is a calculated one — he is presenting himself as a straight-shooting ally, someone who will offer unvarnished advice that serves as a counterweight to the opportunists he claims are currently steering his foreign and domestic policy.
In recent days, Tillis has taken particular issue with White House deputy Stephen Miller for egging on Trump’s preoccupation with taking Greenland away from Denmark, a NATO ally.
“Whoever thinks that the current posture of the president on Greenland is a good idea, they’re unfit,” said Tillis, insinuating that Miller was too “ambitious” and inexperienced to offer Trump sound policy recommendations.
“I don’t like arrogance, when somebody thinks, just because they’ve got a title, that they’re more capable than they really are,” Tillis added. “Bring the experience, demonstrate the results, show me how all these things are actually working and helping the president’s legacy. That’s my only point.”
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The indirect criticism downplays Trump’s own agency in decision-making and ignores the fact that many of the president’s fixations predate his second term. Acquiring Greenland has been a priority for Trump, for example, since at least 2019.
Still, Trump has shown himself to be ideologically flexible and can be swayed with nudging from the more establishment wing of his party. In fact, Tillis’s sparring with Trump advisers is part of a larger tug-of-war between loyalists to the president and those who hope, in the final analysis, that Trump will have governed as more or less a traditional Republican president.
Tillis risks being viewed as an antagonist to Trump due to his repeated criticisms, with less friendly Republicans welcoming his willingness to buck the White House.
“Good speech, Tillis!” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), who voted to convict Trump on impeachment charges after the Jan. 6 riot, shouted on Wednesday after Tillis walked off the Senate floor.
And in certain respects, Tillis has shown little care for how Trump views his actions, leading an effort to hang a plaque honoring the officers who defended the Capitol from pro-Trump rioters on Jan. 6, a step House Republicans have resisted for years.
It would be an overstatement, however, to say that Tillis has gone the way of other Trump-critical Republicans who made a clean break with the president after his first term.
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Trump could not win over Tillis’s support for his signature policy achievement last year — a sprawling tax law that Tillis opposed due to its Medicaid cuts. That vote, and the bitter fallout that ensued, contributed to his decision to retire in June.
Tillis has nonetheless stuck with the president on other difficult votes, voting to confirm his Cabinet nominees and opposing most of the Democrat-led resolutions challenging the president’s authority to impose tariffs and engage in military action abroad.
Most recently, he sided with Trump on a Senate vote challenging his war powers in Venezuela, even as five other Republicans broke rank. In the case of Greenland, Tillis is for now declining to support legislation rebuking Trump or reining in his ability to send troops there.
“We’re all in the rhetoric stage now, and to support that lends legitimacy to the threat. And I don’t believe it’s a threat,” Tillis said, before taking another apparent dig at Miller. “I think the only threat is the bonehead giving the president this advice.”
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Tillis is painfully aware that each of his statements will be viewed in light of his retirement decision, but he reasons the scrutiny would have been far more intense had he decided to run for a third term.
It’s the times he’s wavered in his support for the president that have stoked speculation about how election-year politics is influencing his thinking, as was the case when he backed Pete Hegseth’s controversial nomination for war secretary despite misgivings over misconduct allegations.
But Tillis maintains that he would be embracing the president’s agenda whether he is up for reelection or not, and that even when he disagrees with Trump, it’s usually on the “how” and not the substance of the matter.
“I chose not to run for reelection so that I could remove any doubt,” Tillis told the Washington Examiner.
“Everybody wants to sit here and say, ‘Well, Tillis has just gotten brave because I’m not running for reelection.’ I have completely removed that distraction, so that when you all report me being on board with the president, it won’t be, ‘Oh, that’s just because he’s running for reelection.’ That was a part of my calculus,” Tillis added.
In terms of his relationship with Trump, Tillis insists that it’s a cordial one. Publicly, Trump lambasted Tillis over his “no” vote on the tax law, calling him a “complainer” who didn’t know how to get things done, and threatened to run a primary challenger against him in 2026.
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Tillis said that his private interactions since then, however, have been constructive and that he’s “never had a cross word with the president.”
“We’ve never had an elevated discussion in either direction,” Tillis said in his floor speech.