Senator Tillis, Pecking at the Edges

 

Senator Thom Tillis, since his resignation announcement, has been talking in public, especially on CNN. An interview with Jake Tapper made solid news for North Carolina politicos. But while Tillis pecks effectively at the rough edges of trumpism, he avoids the elephant in the room: 

“I don’t have a problem with President Trump. I got a problem with some of the people I consider to be amateurs advising him. And I want to make it very clear to them: When you act like the president when he’s out of the room, you don’t impress me.”

Hmmm. Another Stephen Miller sighting?

But isn't it always the fault of advisors, in recent U.S. history? Some underling started Watergate. A whole bunch of underlings told LBJ he could win Vietnam. Etc. As though what's fundamentally wrong with this present administration is just the wayward underlings doing poor work or giving even poorer advice. About Hegseths’ recent failure to inform the White House before he authorized a pause on weapons shipments to Ukraine: “The whole idea of having a pause on Ukraine defensive arms, that’s just amateurish.” And in the same interview, he added: “With the passing of time, I think it’s clear Hegseth’s out of his depth as a manager of a large, complex organization.”

About passage of the BBB tax and spending cuts package that Trump signed into law last week -- without Tillis’s vote -- Tillis volunteered this political warning: “I told the president, I really do believe the Big Beautiful Bill could be his Obamacare. I think it’s politically just devastating.”

And Tillis said he stood on principle against any presidential nominee who "excuses" January 6th: “They’re not going to get confirmed in my remaining tenure in the US Senate.” 

Yeah, right. In the immediate aftermath of that threat, Tillis announced he'll "probably" vote to advance the nomination of Emil Bove, Trump’s former criminal defense attorney and unethical hit-man, picked for a lifetime judgeship on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. Bove was instrumental in the presidential pardon for the Jan. 6th rioters.

Is Lara Trump House-Shopping in Wilmington?

 

Speculation is the oxygen of politics. So naturally I'm gonna breathe -- that is, read a list of potential Republican candidates for Thom Tillis's Senate seat. The NandO put Lara Trump in the first spot:

...the president’s daughter-in-law, a Fox News host, is “strongly considering jumping in the race,” NBC News reported. She is a native of Wilmington and formerly co-chaired the Republican National Committee. An unnamed source close to the Trump family told NBC News Sunday that if Lara Trump were to declare for Tillis’s seat, “The race will be over before it begins.”

My instinct is to agree with that. She would sweep the primary and could very possibly win the seat. Unless she turns out to run a bad campaign, a smug campaign, an inept campaign, or come across on the stump as all hat, no cattle. The whole Donald Jethro Trump extended family will descend on us, with lots of moolah.

Which Democrat could beat her? Roy Cooper? His silence over the last few months suggests disengagement, not the massive in-take of wind for bursting forth as a candidate for US Senate. Thomas Mills thinks he's out for 2026. Mills wants Jeff Jackson to step in.

Jeff Jackson could beat Lara Trump (though his strategists better start thinking out of the box!). I would hate like hell to lose Jackson as our Attorney General and would dread a Dan Bishop clone getting his hands on the reins of NC law (like that corrupted blond lawyer who took over the Department of Justice for Jethro). So losing Jackson carries both potential reward and consequential risk.

BREAKING: Thom Tillis Admits Defeat to Trump

 

The Associated Press reports Republican Sen. Thom Tillis won't seek reelection after opposing President Donald Trump's major new tax and spending bill, which advanced in the Republican-controlled Senate Saturday night.

Wiley Nickel Jumps; Is There Water in the Pool?

 

Wiley Nickel applauding Roy Cooper
in earlier days

Back in January, ex-Congressman Wiley Nickel, who's been itching to run for the US Senate against Thom Tillis, told reporter Bryan Anderson that he wouldn't want to run in a primary against the much better known and frankly more politically formidable ex-Governor Roy Cooper. Don't know what's happened to change that, but yesterday Nickel announced his campaign for Senate, and Cooper is still "considering."

Cooper will be the instant frontrunner if and when he announces a campaign against Tillis. Maybe Nickel is trying to flush Cooper out, but will he graciously step aside when Cooper announces, or will he insist on going through defeat in a primary?

Politico reported:

“I have absolutely nothing but good things to say about former Governor Roy Cooper,” Nickel said. “My focus is Thom Tillis, who is voting over and over with Donald Trump on disastrous policies that are going to harm North Carolina.”

A person directly familiar with Cooper’s thinking granted anonymity to speak about private conversations said the governor is still “actively considering the decision to run” and he’ll decide after he completes his Harvard University fellowship later this spring. “Announcements by other potential candidates will not have an impact on his decision,” the person added.

 

Signs of the Times

 

Sen. Thom Tillis held a big fundraiser at the Raleigh Country Club yesterday, but it looks like the protestors outside may have outnumbered the pooh-bahs handing over checks inside.

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). 

"Oops" of the Week

 

The Thom Tillis reelection campaign is hosting a big, splashy fundraiser in Raleigh on March 21st, but the invitations went out listing newly elected Rep. Pat Harrigan (10th CD) as a "special guest" at the fundraiser. That was news to Rep. Harrigan, who was quick to embarrass Tillis:

“Congressman Harrigan did not authorize or approve the use of his name in any materials for an event supporting Senator Tillis,” Lexi Kranich, Harrigan’s communications director, said in a statement. “While we recognize the importance of holding this critical Senate seat for Republicans, Congressman Harrigan’s focus remains on advancing President Trump’s America First agenda.” (Punchbowl News)

Rumors surfaced later that new Reps. Addison McDowell (6th CD) and Brad Knott (13th CD) also denied that they had committed to Tillis's fundraiser.

Tillis Goes Weak on Betrayal of Ally to Voracious Russian Bear

I'm inclined to take Senator Thom Tillis's repeated knee-bending to Trump as just the inevitable byproduct of political parties, even one as generally inept as the Democratic Party. We all of us get furious with "traitors." We discipline the wavering, the doubtful, the fearful. We cuss 'em, we primary them and use rhetoric as hurtful and threatening as anything MAGA uses on its trump-lite. Lite like Senator Thom Tillis. The hard right in North Carolina hates his guts (to coin a novel phrase). So I don't blame him for playing bluff-and-hide. I'm just doubtful his squishiness is gonna work on unaffiliated voters (which he admitted in a recent interview was his only path to reelection).

Sen. Tillis has been a Russia hawk and very recently called Vlad Putin "a cancer." So the Tillis two-step since the Zelenskyy meeting in the White House looks like another failure of character, and in my estimation the worst of the lot. Rob Schofield this morning:

It’s one thing to disagree with your party’s leader about taxes, or the size of government, or even interpretations of the Constitution, and still remain allied. It’s quite another when that leader abandons two-and-a-half centuries of history as a global champion of democratic government and freedom and affirmatively aligns the United States with a committed opponent of both — the murderous Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.

Yeah. That's hard to forgive. 

The Middling Thom Tillis

 

Interesting interview Sen. Thom Tillis gave Calen Razor and Ursula Perano for NOTUS.org:

“We’re a decidedly purple state,” Tillis said. “I’ve got Republicans saying it’s trending red, and I got Democrats saying it’s trending blue, and no — when you’ve got the unaffiliated base now at over 40%, it’s an independent state, and I love that. The way you win in North Carolina is you’re gonna win somewhere around 49%, maybe 50%.”

“And it’s all about a million people who you know are in the middle,” he added.

True dat.

Being "middling" (in his passion for trumpism). incidentally, is precisely what got Tillis censured by the North Carolina Republican Party in 2023. He had associated himself with a push to codify same-sex and interracial marriage, and he'd also been caught in the act of cooperating with Democrats on a big border bill that would have helped if not fixed many of the problems. Something had shifted in Tillis -- he had tried to ban gay marriage in NC when he was House Speaker -- and it might have been nothing more mysterious than a sharp political instinct. "Senator" was a different game altogether.

Razor and Perano detail Tillis's conservative orthodoxy during his speakership of the NCHouse -- two terms, starting in 2011. "He worked to increase restrictions on abortion, led efforts to block the expansion of Medicaid, fought for tighter voting ID requirements...."

Tillis may be no trumpist. He's also no moderate. He hews to classic conservatism about who gets to control women's bodies, on just how we shouldn't oughta be "coddling the poor," on limiting who can vote -- the hallmarks of Tillis's tenure in the NCHouse -- and he's distinguished himself now by voting for every freak that Trump wanted on his Cabinet and staying silent when he should be pounding tabletops. Just days ago Tillis was warning that Putin "is a cancer." What has he said since yesterday?

 

According to The Hill, which cornered Tillis for a comment on the Zelenskyy betrayal and the White House ambush, Tillis wimped out with "concern" that ultimately degraded to "let Trump be Trump":

“I’m concerned with anything that would ultimately allow there to be a moral equivalency between Zelensky and Putin..." [Tillis said]

  

"The president has used some fairly successful, aggressive negotiating tactics in the past, so I’ll give him latitude for now,” Tillis continued. “But at the end of the day, Putin needs to be a loser and the Ukrainian people need to be the winners. Let’s get past the leadership personalities and talk about what’s most important: a free Ukraine, not for its own sake, but for the sake of national security, the United States, European security.”

Yeah, middling senator.

If a Paper Tiger Roars in the Woods...

 

Some news outlets went a little giddy over the Senate video of Thom Tillis telling on Putin and pushing back hard against Trump's characterization of both Zelenskyy and Ukraine -- without ever uttering Trump's name. This led Morning Joe this morning:

CNN headlined "GOP lawmaker warns that Putin is a 'cancer' in fiery speech." 

But those of us in North Carolina know Thom Tillis better than that. Every time we think he's suddenly gotten a spine, it's all performative strutting, because the next minute he'll be bending the knee and toeing the line and drinking the Kool Aid. The fact that he occasionally speaks truth to power, as in that video above, doesn't mean he'll actually stand up. Talk is cheap. Also fairly safe, apparently. But you know Trump's gonna hear about this.

Sen. Tillis: Hooked Fish Flopping on the Riverbank

 

To recap the disgrace, Donald Jackoff Trump said in recent days that Ukraine is to blame for the start of the war. He reporters from his Mar-a-Lago estate that Ukrainian leaders “could have made a deal.” Yesterday, he sharpened his criticism, calling Zelenskyy a “dictator without elections.”

Enter Thom Tillis, timidly clearing his throat (according to the NYTimes):

Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina, who recently returned from a trip to Kyiv where he and two other senators reaffirmed their support for Ukraine, balked at the “dictator” remark.

“It’s not a word I would use,” he told reporters on Wednesday.

“There is no moral equivalency between Vladimir Putin and President Zelensky,” Mr. Tillis said of the comments Mr. Trump made in a post on his social media site.

But Mr. Tillis, who recently considered and then retreated from a confrontation with Mr. Trump over his defense secretary, was also careful to avoid directly criticizing the president’s approach. Mr. Tillis said he believed Mr. Trump would ultimately listen to his advisers and take note of the discomfort from Republicans on Capitol Hill, who may be privately urging him to avoid appeasing Mr. Putin.

Got new for you, Senator Bucko: Jackoff takes no notice of anyone's discomfort, especially yours and other members of his purported party in Congress.

The Scene Outside Thom Tillis's Greensboro Office on Wednesday

These protests appear to be largely spontaneous. Tillis needs to be confronted by his craven obeisance to King Trump. 

Paul Garber for WFDD

Tillis Disapproves of the Blanket Pardons

 

This is about as bold as Thom Tillis gets, in between bouts of kissing royal ass:

"It was surprising to me that it was a blanket pardon." Weak tea.

Congressional reporter Lisa Desjardins (PBS News Hour) got Sen. Tillis to go that far on the record about Trump's sweeping pardon of 1,600, some of them Grade A police-beating thugs. 

But Tillis also said this:

"I'm about to file two bills that will increase the penalties up to and including the death penalty for the murder of a police officer and increasing the penalties and creating federal crimes for assaulting a police officer. That should give you everything you need to know about my position."

There's always a chance that someday in the next four years, Thom's testicles will fully descend, and he'll deepen his squeaky voice.

Thom Tillis Gets His First Republican Primary Challenger

 

Andy Nilsson is a bit of a head-scratcher. The Tillis campaign immediately labeled him a "never Trumper," and Nilsson does have a somewhat puzzling history of bucking the trumpist majority. "In 2019, he joined former N.C. Supreme Court justice Bob Orr [who left the Republican Party because of Trump] in trying to organize an alternative GOP convention to the Republican National Convention scheduled in Charlotte in 2020" (WRAL). Nilsson told the Charlotte Observer in 2019, “I’m doing all I can do to preserve the Reagan-Bush legacy of the Republican Party against the Trump takeover.” 

Going apparently for full-on cognitive dissonance, Nilsson told WRAL that he supports Trump, "but he was disturbed to see Republicans in some states cancel their GOP presidential primaries in an effort to protect the president." Nilsson is challenging Tillis "because he doesn’t believe the incumbent can be relied upon to fully support Trump’s America-first agenda," Nilsson’s campaign said.

This guy is confusing the hell outta me. In some ways -- the gingerly waffling all over the place about Trump -- he seems like another Thom Tillis.

He has a decades-ago history of running furniture companies in NC, moved to Australia in 2002 and didn't return to North Carolina until 2023. "Nilsson is a Cincinnati native whose family moved to Catawba County when he was a child. He graduated from Winston-Salem’s Reynolds High School in 1985 and Davidson College in 1989. Nilsson now works in special education at Reynolds High Schools, where he’s a teacher assistant and assistant football coach." He once upon a time -- 2000 -- ran unsuccessfully in the Republican primary for lieutenant governor.

Tillis Declares Candidacy, Sucks Up to MAGA

 

The highly endangered Sen. Thom Tillis wasted no time in announcing his reelection bid yesterday. He went public as a candidate by way of a Senate Republican fundraiser, happening Wednesday evening in DeeCee. His first public appearance as a beseeching candidate, and how natural to do it with the crowd from whence cometh his influence, since his own North Carolina party censored him and he's widely mocked by the most vociferous of the NC MAGA adherents.

It’s not a surprise that Tillis is running for reelection, but he did tell Spectrum News in 2019 that he was “unlikely” to run for a third term.

Now he sounds up for the fight and confident, and he's pledging total allegiance to the Trump doctrine: 

“If I can’t defend myself in a primary after being a two-term member, then I’m not very good at my job,” Tillis told Spectrum News. “The real question is how well are we going to govern. How well are we going to come in and support President Trump and fulfill the promises that we’ve made. If we don’t do that, that’s going to be very, very difficult for anybody in the 2026 cycle to be successful, me or anybody else.”

Oh, you're so bought and paid for, you poor sad sack, whistling through the graveyard. 

Thom Tillis Gets Fingered for Possible Elimination as a "Squish" Senator

 

The voice of MAGA, channeled by Kurt Schlichter (almost rhymes with sphincter), shows us why Thom Tillis will forever cave to Trump as he approaches his reelection in 2026 -- fear of the viciousness of trumpism and its adherents. 

Schlichter is plenty vicious. In a column headlined "We Need to Ritually Sacrifice a Squish GOP Senator to Encourage the Others," he writes:

There is a wonderful and salutatory effect to publicly posting a head on a pike for all to see ....That is, we in the America First movement must figuratively post the head of at least one hack GOP establishment senator at the summit of Capitol Hill during the 2026 cycle. The real question is who we’re going to make an example of....

How about Thom Tillis in North Carolina? He’s always been terrible. He’s genuinely soft. There are harder noodles. The problem is that North Carolina could go blue if we don’t get the right candidate. We don’t want to risk that if we can help it, and he might be the best candidate to hold it. But we shouldn’t take him out of contention. If he knows he’s a potential primary target, he may ignore his Romneyesque instincts and play ball.

Oh, he's gonna play ball. He's gonna play ball hard. He's gonna kiss Trump's ass right up next the hole, where it's black and red and bitter.

But he'll still be primaried. The only question: Will he face a primary with a natural born loser, like Mark Robinson, or someone actually credible? We'll know well before the end of 2025.

Let's Draft Roy Cooper for Senate in '26

 

"Everything is on the table right now."

--Gov. Roy Cooper, to WSOC, about whether he is considering a Senate run in 2026 against Sen. Thom Tillis

Smart money in North Carolina bets he runs. The smartest money bets he wins.

Meanwhile, Sen. Tillis has to worry that he might not make it through a primary, as the MAGA wing of the NCGOP can't tolerate him.

Tillis as Chameleon

 

With murky core values, compromise became his guiding principle.

--Thomas Mills, commenting on Sen. Thom Tillis

Everybody is dumping on speculating about Sen. Thom Tillis's continued survival as a chameleon politician, whom Mills outs as a flagrant empty suit in a very recent essay on his Substack feed. In Mills's discerning view, Tillis long ago compromised away any values he's willing to actually stand up for. Mills contrasts the Tillis of today to the Tillis who first won his Senate seat in 2006, betting that after his brief feint for principle in the case of Matt Gaetz, Tillis will end up voting for every corrupt and unqualified cabinet secretary that Trump sends up the hill:

If you had told 2006 Thom Tillis, the guy who had just won a state house primary from suburban district, that he would be supporting a convicted sex offender who is selling commemorative coins and bibles for President of the United States, he would have laughed at you. If you told 2006 Tillis that he was about to vote to confirm a woman who has credibly been accused of being a Russian asset as Director of National Intelligence, he would have vehemently denied it. Or if you told him that he would be voting to confirm a vaccine denier to head Health and Human Services, he would say you were crazy. And if you asked him whether a Defense Secretary nominee with no managerial experience and allegations of sexual assault should be confirmed, he would tell you, “Of course not.” And yet 2024 Thom Tillis will probably vote for all three.

 

The Silly Spectacle of Thom Tillis, Suck-Up

 

Sunday morning Thom Tillis published this photoshopped montage on his Twitter feed, with the title "January 20th," as though Trump were the dignified scourge of God marching toward Bethlehem to be born on Inauguration Day Number 2, intimating that the Trump retribution is exactly what the senior senator has been waiting for. The horse-laughs on Twitter that this post occasioned haven't stopped. For example: "Damn Thom, you are funny as hell this morning! You know we’re all laughing at your RINO ass!!!"

We chalk up Tillis's transparent attempt to impersonate MAGA to the fact he's already running for his seat in the 2026 Republican primary. I enjoyed Alexander H. Jones's take on Tillis's chances in that primary, published on his New Branchhead substack, titled "Thom Tillis Doesn't Stand a Chance in a Primary":

Thom Tillis’s political career has been built upon sheer serendipity. Hobbling into his first election with a severely battered image, he reaped the electoral windfall of an imaginary Ebola epidemic to upset Democrat Kay Hagan. He won reelection because his opponent was a cad. For the last ten years, the fates have compensated this unimpressive man for his complete lack of political talent.

It may be that Tillis’s best—or perhaps even only—hope to remain in the US Senate after 2026 will be for this long string of fortunate events to continue. That’s because he will face a primary from Mark Robinson or another MAGA fire-eater that the lackluster incumbent has minimal chance of surviving. Republican voters, always unsatisfied with Tillis, will have their first real chance to eject the man from office. In a Republican primary, Tillis won’t stand a chance.

Till Us Do Part

 

North Carolina's senior senator Thom Tillis has been listed as one of six Republicans "who could sink Trump's nominations" for cabinet secretaries. Watching that play out will provide us with some tawdry entertainment and an index of just how big -- or puny -- are Tillis's balls.

After Trump nominated Matt Gaetz, Tillis told reporters, ominously, "The president deserves to put forth a nominee. [But!...] The president has an obligation to make sure that that nominee is gonna pass vetting and have the votes on the floor." He also said that the public "should not be shocked" if Gaetz is not confirmed.

"I will consider Matt Gaetz like I will anyone else, but if they don't do the homework, don't be surprised if they fail. Maybe they've already done that work," he added. "Nothing surprises me in politics, nothing. And I'm okay with this. But at the end of the day we have a process, and we'll just have to run through it."

Tillis added that he cares about "a defensible résumé, and a really clean vetting. Produce that, he's got a chance. Don't, and he doesn't."

We've seen those odd moments when Tillis has disappointed MAGA, but we believe that he, along with the other five senators who might vote against Trump's wishes, are weak reeds that will bend to the breaking point. After all, Susan Collins is a part of this doubtful cohort, and we certainly know how strongly committed to virtue she is!