Thom Tillis, Act Three

 

Few Republican senators give a better floor speech than Thom Tillis of North Carolina does. He’s the Daniel Day-Lewis of moral outrage.

--Frank Bruni

Tillis "seems to be at war with himself," Bruni wrote yesterday in the NYTimes, detailing the moral outrage he recently expressed, 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.' ” Compare that to his vote to confirm Putin pal Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence.

Moral outrage: His impassioned remarks in the Senate disagreeing with Trump’s pardons of Jan. 6 rioters who bloodied law enforcement officers.

Compared to: He voted to confirm Kash Patel, "who has peddled the kinds of fictions that fueled that violence," as director of the FBI.

And so forth.

Too bad, actually, Bruni argues, because underneath the craven subservience to Trump lurks a pretty respectable mensch with ideas and ethical standards. Cal Cunningham, who ran against Tillis and remains a friend, says that Tillis is "a practical, progress-minded lawmaker at heart." It's just short of tragic that this man who "could have been a good and maybe even great senator in an earlier age, when bipartisan deal making was rewarded. ... 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,” said Asher Hildebrand, Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy (where Frank Bruni also teaches).