Last week, during Kristi Noem’s hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina lashed into her leadership of the Department of Homeland Security.
It was a long time coming. In January, he and Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska became the first Republicans to say Noem should go. That came after the killing of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, whom Noem called Pretti a domestic terrorist.
But Tillis took it a step further by attacking Noem for writing in her book about killing her dog Cricket. It was no surprise that Tillis, an inveterate dog lover who just the week before hosted a Mardi Gras dog parade, would find Noem’s actions reprehensible.
“It was a precipitous, emotionally-based decision, and that's not unlike some of the precipitous, emotionally-based decisions she's made as secretary,” he told The Independent.
It was just the latest example of how Tillis, who will retire from the Senate after two terms at the end of the year, has made small breaks with the Trump administration. And he shows no signs of slowing down. Over the weekend, Tillis told CNN’s Jake Tapper that White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s mass deportation strategy, should step aside.
“Because he’s incompetent, giving the president bad advice, that’s why,” Tillis told The Independent on Monday.
Tillis has been on the warpath against Miller for awhile, mostly because of Miller’s saber rattling about the Trump administration taking over Greenland.
“It's going to be something that someone in the White House has told the president to double down on and I just don't believe it's achievable,” he said in January. “So that's bad advice, and whoever's giving it to him needs to get the hell out of the White House.”
Of course, Tillis — who had spent much of his time in the Senate supporting Trump’s agenda while also becoming a bipartisan dealmaker — can say all of this because he does not have to worry about a primary challenge.
Still, to hear Tillis tell it, he and President Donald Trump have never been better.
“Everybody speculates about the relationship the president and I have,” Tillis told The Independent in January. “We've never had a cross word with one another.”
It’s easy to see why people might think otherwise. After he called for Noem’s ouster, Trump called Tillis and Murkowski “losers” and said Tillis had “lost his voice.”
That doesn’t mean Tillis doesn’t have a series of issues with the White House, though it seems like he consistently puts the focus not on the president, but his advisers.
He said that he would refuse to vote for any Trump nominee for the Senate Banking Committee amid the Justice Department’s probe into Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell.
It’s an odd ending for Tillis. He first came to power in 2010 when he helped flip both houses of the North Carolina state legislature for the first time in a century. He parlayed that into flipping a Senate seat in 2014.
During Trump’s first presidency, he helped pass the First Step Act, Trump’s signature criminal justice reform law.
In 2020, he won re-election when Trump won North Carolina for a second time. But with Trump out of the picture, Tillis built a reputation for a bipartisan dealmaker. After the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas in 2022, then-Minority Leader Mitch McConnell dispatched him and Sen. John Cornyn of Texas to negotiate with then-Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema and Chris Murphy on a major gun violence bill.
The bill would pass, burnishing his credentials on the Hill and gaining him respect among Democrats.
He and Sinema followed that up by passing the Respect for Marriage Act, which codified protections for same-sex and interracially married couples. The duo did so with the help of Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisc.) and former Ohio Republican Sen. Rob Portman.
But the Senate changed significantly since then. Portman and Sinema, who quit the Democratic Party to become an independent, both left the Senate.
When a bipartisan group of senators including Sinema and Murphy attempted to broker a deal for tighter border security for additional aid to Ukraine in 2024, Trump came out against it and Portman’s successor, MAGA Sen. JD Vance, called it an “atrocious proposal.”
That infuriated Tillis, a supporter of NATO, but it was a sign of things to come. One of Trump’s first campaign stops after Jack Smith indicted him was at the North Carolina Republican Party state convention. That same gathering, state Republicans sanctioned Tillis for his dealmaking.
Tillis also backed a challenger to the former lieutenant governor Mark Robinson, Trump’s pick for governor in 2024, before scandal engulfed Robinson and handed the governorship to Democrat Josh Stein despite Trump winning the state.
Had Tillis run again, he likely would be suffering the same fate as Cornyn, who had to pivot to the right to stave off a primary challenge against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
Instead, Tillis is avoiding a bruising primary and an even more difficult general against former Democratic governor Roy Cooper, a popular figure in the state. Instead, the state’s former party chairman Michael Whatley, who served as Republican National Committee chairman in 2024, will run against Cooper.
But Tillis warned that Republicans risk losing if they appeal only to their base this coming election.
“This is team ball guys,” he said. “Once you get to this mode, every member needs to set aside their 20% differences and work as a team. The party that does is the party that wins the day.”
That doesn’t mean that Tillis has not followed along with the president. He opposed the War Powers Act resolution on Venezuela and Iran. He notched probably the biggest win of his career with the federal recognition of the Lumbee Tribe that lives primarily in Robeson County last year. Trump had campaigned heavily on the recognition of the tribe.
It’s clear Tillis doesn’t want to be remembered as an anti-Trump Republican. He said in his final months, he said he wanted to “a good legacy for the president.”
“I mean, if you go in and you tell the President a bad idea is a good idea, or you come up with a bad idea yourself, own it and don't have the president have to deal with the consequences of just not thinking through,” he said.
That might be the closest a mainstream conservative Republican will get to criticizing the president outright.
In an era where total devotion to Trump becomes the defining trait of what it means to be a Republican, that might be insufficient. And it means the amateurs he doesn’t like still have time, but the clock is ticking for pragmatists like Tillis.
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