Thom Tillis, a retiring North Carolina RINO, spent the last few days doing what he would not do in a primary. He bashed the president who carried his state, and shopped a book about it. He took the act to 60 Minutes on Sunday and The View on Monday. The book came out Tuesday.
Tillis has served two terms. He was elected in 2014, sworn in January 2015, and leaves in January 2027. He knows the last general-election result. He is still arguing with it.
Sunday he told Ross Douthat the next Republican nominee cannot be a MAGA candidate, because that candidate could not win a general election. After a tough midterm, he said, Trump will have a heavy hand in the 2028 primary, and the party has to speak frankly about the profile it needs. Asked what was wrong with the president’s pick, he said it works in red MAGA states and will not work in a general.
Trump won the popular vote in 2024 with about 77.3 million votes, carried all seven swing states, including North Carolina, and took 312 electoral votes to Kamala Harris’s 226. In North Carolina, Trump received 2,898,423 votes to Kamala Harris’s 2,715,375, about 51% to 47.8%, wider than his margin in 2020. Tillis is not arguing with a theory. He is arguing with a certified result in his own state, and he is losing the argument.
He knew it was coming, which makes the lecture worse. On October 23, 2024, he told Bloomberg Television that Trump would carry North Carolina by about the margin he won in 2020. The brand he now calls a general-election loser is the brand he was counting on to save his state. Trump won. Tillis is the one fleeing.
He is arguing from the door because the door is the only place he is brave. On June 29, 2025, the day after he and Rand Paul voted against advancing the One Big Beautiful Bill and Trump said he was considering a primary, Tillis announced he would not run again.
Trump called him a talker and a complainer, not a doer. That was generous. Instead of fighting for the seat, he wrote a book, How to Lose Friends and Antagonize Presidents, and booked the two shows that exist to applaud a Republican who hates his own voters. Courage, on his schedule, starts when the primary can no longer hurt him.
It is no mystery. The primary he skipped already answered for him, and not in his favor. Michael Whatley, Trump’s endorsee, the former Republican National Committee chair, won the March 3 nomination with 64.6%. Don Brown, the next closest, took 15.6%.
The general is against former governor Roy Cooper, who won the Democratic primary with 92% and leads the early polling. Tillis handed his voters a Trump-backed nominee, refused to defend the seat himself, and then went on CBS to say that kind of nominee cannot win. Whatley is on the ballot. Tillis is on a book tour.
Mitch McConnell was his mentor in the Senate, which tells you the ambition and the taste. Tillis named a dog Little Mitch after him, and in 2024 he said Little Mitch evokes the same emotions as Big Mitch, and that there is a reason he named a dog after Mitch. He still has the dog. He also rents McConnell’s carriage house in Washington. He votes with the party when the camera is off and saves the break for the shows that book critics of Trump.
On 60 Minutes he said he is the same conservative he was in 2014, pro-Second Amendment, pro-life, for limited government and fiscal restraint. The only difference, he said, between him and people who call themselves true conservatives is that he has a long list of things that were ratified and they do not. The list is the deals that put him at war with the voters who elected him, recited now that those voters cannot retire him.
He claims he is filled with regret. He voted to confirm the Trump Cabinet, including Pete Hegseth. That vote was 50-50. His was the vote that kept the nomination alive, and Vance broke the tie. In the book he calls it the biggest regret of his career and wants Hegseth out. He writes that he also should have stopped Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and he names Tulsi Gabbard, former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and Howard Lutnick among the picks he now faults.
On 60 Minutes he called Noem and Hegseth the poster children for people who should never have had the authority they were given, citing a $200 million Homeland Security ad campaign and Noem’s description of people who were shot as potentially domestic terrorists. The regret arrived after the votes, and after the primary he refused to face.
On The View the next day, Whoopi Goldberg noted that he calls Trump a snowflake and still calls him an amazing political talent, and asked what she was missing. Alyssa Farah Griffin asked about his vote to confirm Pete Hegseth, which he now calls the biggest regret of his career. Tillis said he had deferred to his former Armed Services colleagues, that they all made a mistake, and that he hopes Hegseth gets fired. Ana Navarro then asked why he confirmed nominees he had called unqualified, Hegseth and Kristi Noem among them, and why he had just voted for Todd Blanche. He confirmed the people he now criticizes, Hegseth among them, then said the confirmation was a mistake. That is not oversight. That is a man building a second career as the Republican who warned you, after he declined to cast the no vote when it counted.
The same pattern of inconsistency shows up in his account of January 6. On 60 Minutes, Tillis told Douthat the day was despicable, that the people who assaulted police should still be in prison, and that they were there for the president. He was not disgusted enough to convict. He voted against conviction and now says the trial was rushed. He kept the vote that protected his standing in the conference and kept the speech that plays on CBS and ABC. Disgust, like courage, arrived after the risk was gone.
Tillis claims at least 30 Republican senators share his reservations in private and will not say so because Trump would target them in a primary. His line was that martyrs are dead. Then do not call it a principle. Call it a head count. They are not on 60 Minutes or The View. He is, because he is done and he wants the booking.
Tillis will be remembered as a senator who won twice, narrowly both times, and then quit rather than face a third. In 2014 he beat Kay Hagan. In 2020 he survived by 1.8 points, 48.7% to 46.9%, after Cal Cunningham’s affair disclosure. He is not running from a rematch with Cunningham. He is declining the term. That is a thin basis for a lecture on who can win a general. He won a Senate seat twice. He did not win a presidential election. Trump did, including in his state.
