‘a Train Wreck In November’: Thom Tillis On Trump, His Advisers And The Gop’s Fate

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Most members of Congress who aren't running again leave with a final floor speech and perhaps a little party with current and former staff. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) isn't the typical retiring type.

The two-term Tar Heel is exiting the Senate with the political equivalent of a cannon blast: a book timed for pre-midterms publication that savages President Donald Trump's appointees and warns that his Republican Party is on the path to electoral ruin.

How to Lose Friends and Antagonize Presidents is a profane, often-candid and often-maddening memoir-screed about Tillis's up-from-the-trailer-park rise to his final months in the Senate.

It's profane because it's littered with f-bombs and slightly milder fare, candid because he reveals his conversations with Trump and his advisers and maddening because Tillis largely spares the president of agency — even as the senator chronicles moment after moment in which Trump himself caused turmoil.

I met Tillis to discuss all of this at the Carolina Family Restaurant, a 50-year-old institution close to CLT that puts out superb eggs, grits, biscuits and country ham starting early each morning. Like so many such diners across the country, the restaurant is run by a second-generation Greek-American, whose parents first built and sustained it with seven-day-a-week sweat equity.

For his part, Tillis isn't exactly sweating the midterms. He's happy to be on his way out and is even keeping a countdown clock on his phone to "whoop-ass."

No, really, he showed me.

And if he's careful about how he treats the president himself — Tillis repeatedly says in the book he's no Never Trumper — it's because he wants to play a role in the post-Trump GOP rebuild.

Watch the full video on YouTube or listen to it as a podcast for the whole story.

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

I want to start with the following cannon blast on page 79: “The funny thing,” Senator Thom Tillis writes, “The funny thing about trifectas in Washington is that the winning party always reads it as a mandate. Then, two years later, they realized that the voters simply gave them a chance to govern after the other guys fucked it all up.” Is that what's happening now? 

Back in April of last year, I gave the first 90 days of the administration time to settle in, and then I wrote this letter to the conference in April last year saying, “Guys, if we continue this trajectory, we're going to have an environment very similar to what I experienced in 2010 in reverse, the environment that made me Speaker of the House.”

It was clear that the Obama administration was going to overreach. They did. And based on the trajectory from last April, I thought the same thing here, and now here we are. You're reporting, everybody else is reporting a less-than-pleasant environment for Republicans in November.

So the backlash comes, your party pays the price. At this point, you lose the House, the Senate. 

No, I still believe we can hold on to the Senate. I think it's gonna be tight. My guess is we may lose a race we expected to win, but maybe win a race we expected to lose. But I could see us finishing with 50 or 51 members. And that'd be my preference, my goodness. Because we've got to do everything we can to help this administration, and maybe have people that can recognize the value of getting some bipartisan work done. There will be no chance for bipartisan work, I believe, if Congress is controlled by Democrats. Here's what's going to happen: The Democrats are going to do exactly what I said the Republicans were going to do. They're gonna read it as a mandate to be against everything Trump does, versus trying to find a way to work together.

A lot of the book is, at least to my eyes, an exercise in guilt exorcising. And you clearly regret confirming Pete Hegseth, Kristi Noem, Tulsi Gabbard, Bobby Kennedy Jr. 

I regret it, but keep in mind, I don't regret them based on the circumstances at the time of the vote. I regret having confirmed them in the same way I regretted a hiring decision I made for somebody I had to fire. Based on the circumstances at that time, I would make the same decision.

But today you take it back. 

Well, today based on performance — I gave people like Kennedy the benefit of the doubt. Because we had three Republican MDs who were going to give them the benefit of the doubt, and I thought that Cassidy asked a lot of questions, got some reassurances, proved not to be true. Kennedy's not been true to his word in some cases. And then Gabbard just was inconsequential, and you need a consequential person in D&I, and Noem was consequential in a really bad way, and we need incredible leadership and a very, very complex organization in Homeland Security.

I think a lot of folks, maybe some of your constituents, the people in this state who decide elections, who sit in the political middle, would sit here and say, “Senator, you're a smart guy. You've been around politics, speaker of the state House, second-term senator. You were in business before that. Don't bullshit us. Bobby Kennedy Jr. was an anti-vaxxer. He had no business running the Health Department of the United States government. Kristi Noem, who you talk about for killing her dog ad nauseam here. Pete Hegseth is a Fox News personality. Didn't these folks not pass just the smell test?” 

Look, this is in the first 90 days of a president trying to form a government, and for the same reasons I got criticized for confirming Obama nominees and Biden nominees, I give them the benefit of the doubt. Maybe in this case, the benefit of doubt came from two of those committees I'm not on.

You were trying to do due deference to the president and his picks. I guess what I'm saying is some of these folks were pretty odd. 

Actually, Jonathan, you know Washington well, and you also know that nothing exists in a vacuum. And I had a lot of other things that I wanted to get done in this Congress, and I had to balance.

Explain that. 

You know, I really felt like this was the year we were going to put our foot on the accelerator and get Lumbee recognition done.

This is the long-standing tribe that had not gotten it. 

One-hundred-thirty-seven-year story of absolute abuse and racism.

Hadn't gotten federal recognition. 

I'd conclude it was probably going to have to get on the NDAA. I've got a Senate Armed Services Committee that voted unanimously — not only voted unanimously but gushed over Hegseth — in a hearing. And I used to be on that Armed Services Committee. In the absence of compelling data, outside of instincts and everybody with the 20/20 vision of hindsight, am I going to torch that and potentially diminish my chances of getting other things done? The NDAA, I was on the committee for eight years, I used it as a vehicle for getting things done. That weighs into it also.

So this is a trade-off, and your mindset is, "I've got a finite amount of capital that I can spend to get a handful of things done that I want, and if I antagonize the administration on some of their Cabinet picks" —

You just become noise. I mean, I could list people that they ended up being literally just noise.

Like who? 

I'm not talking about the Senate. I'm thinking about some House members. If you say "no" all the time, then you get drowned out, and nobody — even your colleagues who may like you — wants to listen to you. So you're striking that balance, too. I wasn't going to be a Never Trumper because I'm not a Never Trumper. I support most of his policies.

You come back to this time and time again in the book, which is, you really feel strongly about, you don't want to be seen as a Never Trumper. You say, “I'm not Liz Cheney.” 

I also want to be seen as somebody who's trying to protect and promote the Republican Party, of which I've been a member my entire adult life. I don't want to be viewed as that person who's standing on the outside and casting away a party that I worked hard to get established here in North Carolina for good effect.

As you look back, has Trump been good for the party? 

I thought he was good in Trump 1, but in Trump 2, I think he's lost sight. What he's done is he’s created a coalition that, in my opinion, will not stay with Republicans once we go back to traditional Republican platform priorities. I think a lot of the elements of the populism that Trump created to expand a base that made him successful running for president, I don’t think that stays with the party long term.

So let's stay with the Cabinet folks here for a minute. This is a very candid book. Just level with me. Part of your calculation was also, if I want to survive and come back, win a primary, win a general, I can't torpedo some of these Cabinet nominees. I mean, some of this is politics, right? 

No, not really, because quite honestly, I was spending nearly a year convincing myself I should run again. I was not pursuing it. As a matter of fact, if you talk to a lot of people that I would go into fundraising meetings with, I’d say, “You guys, I'm in the middle of confirmatory due diligence. I gotta figure out whether or not it's even worth a third shot. Can I raise the money? Is the political environment going to be there? Is the administration going to demonstrate and prioritize the kinds of things that I would need to win in a state like North Carolina?”

You were inclined not to run at the start. 

I was inclined not to run. In fact, at the end of my first term, I decided not to run then — if it hadn't been for a couple of discussions with people to convince me, if I didn't run, we'd probably lose the seat.

But shouldn't that have made it easier then for you to stand on principle? At least from Hegseth. 

No, you see, that’s my point — of course the liberals want me to burn the place down. Most of them who are saying that I want to stand on principle are people who wanted to destroy this president's formation of the government. Let's just call it for what it is. I mean, my God, it's not that hard to see. “You should have just destroyed the president's formation of a government. How dare you not do that?” Come on.

And, look, if you want to get into a discussion about some marginal noms that my Democrat colleagues voted on, that we voted against, we can have that discussion, too. Why did they do it? Because the president and the administration and the party forced them into it, kind of like forcing them into reversing what I thought was a commitment when they signed the letter with me, when we had the courage to tell Trump 1 that we weren't going to nuke the filibuster, and then they flipped on a dime when Biden said you got to nuke the filibuster.

But, in fairness, there's nuking the entire Cabinet, and there's also making a few judgment calls on people that you have reservations about. 

My point is that these folks did the same thing.

The one who I think you clearly really struggle with, at the time and certainly after, is Hegseth, secretary of Defense.

And I think that's because I was on the committee of jurisdiction. Again, it goes back to what I was saying earlier. It wasn't going to be an arbitrary decision on my part. The reason why I went after that affidavit, after it was voted out of committee, was to see if I could find compelling evidence that could even influence some of the people who voted to get him out of the committee based on new information. That's why I worked so hard for a week to try and get that done.

Because you could have killed it in the crib. 

Yeah, it was reported out of committee. What I was talking about, we knew it was going to be a shirts-and-skins vote on the floor. I was hoping that I could find a first-hand, corroborated account of that affidavit. It never came to pass.

That would have made it easier for not just you but for — 

If I'd found a first-hand corroborated account, I would have voted to nuke the nomination on the floor. But I was hoping I could carry some of the Armed Services members along with me based on the net new information that never came to light.

Was there a moment in 2025 when you realized, damn, this guy's not up for this job? Meaning Hegseth.

It probably took him into the June-July time frame when my concerns, when the concerns about his ability just not to manage a large organization became pretty well-known.

Should Trump fire him now? 

Yeah. Just to give you an idea of how inadequate this guy is: In the midst of an election cycle where anybody with a brain should know we only win if we get enough undecided, unaffiliated voters voting our way — you decide that you want a public execution of a guy in a wheelchair?

You know politics well. Is that a real winner for the undecideds going into November?

I'm gonna go with no. 

I’m gonna go with no, too. And that's another example of how he's incompetent on every level.

But here's the thing, and I come back to this again and again in the book: Trump appointed these folks. Trump has stood by them. And the president himself has got agency. 

The kind of overriding thesis of the book is that Trump's being ill-served, that these advisers around him are ill-serving him — but throughout the book, I would jot in the margins the word “him,” H-I-M. Because you make these references that were not about Trump's advisers; they were things he said and did. And I can just give you a couple of examples. The Easter tweet threatening to bomb Iran. The tariffs, his idea. That's not coming from traditional economic folks, right? It's not in the book, it's more recent. 

Yeah, let me —

Threatening Tom Cotton, for example, for not wanting to adjust daylight saving time, exposing his cellphone number. Senator, none of those things were from Trump's advisers. Those are from Trump himself. You've got to give him some agency, don't you? 

Yeah, but here's the thing. I don't know, maybe I need to dust off the Constitution one more time. I haven't found any section in there where you can fire him, and I'm not going to impeach him. What you can do is fire his advisers, and his advisers being changed will change his behavior because you can't possibly think that every single idea is his coming out of this administration. And that's my point. He's going to be whoever he is. The only thing I can change are the people around him that may be able to tamp down some of those emotions but also not come up with really, really, really shitty ideas that he implements.

But isn't that a hell of a way to run a railroad? 

Hey, look, it's exactly why we're headed to — to continue the analogy — a train wreck in November.

Isn't that the issue that we're trying to figure out? Well, why isn't the president being better served? Why aren't folks looking out for him? Isn't the issue itself that we have to have a president who's managed, his control is mitigated at every waking hour? 

Again, let's remember back when Democrats were trying to decide whether or not Biden runs for a second term, right? What were the motivations of people that were denying the reality that he was not up to the task? It may be power, but I think it's also their brand, their party, the bigger implications for their party. The same thing here. I mean, my God, I don't care if "fill-in-the-blank" Republican president happens to win a national election. I've got to provide some level of support for him or her. Not because I have any natural affinity towards them, but because they are, at that point in time, a key determinant about the future of our party in upcoming elections.

The Senate Republican super PAC has obviously moved spending out of North Carolina. Was there a better option than Michael Whatley to run here for Senate? 

Yeah, I think Michael's problem is he's got a patently partisan resume, right? I mean, he was a lobbyist, but then he was the state party chair, did a fairly good job there, and then the RNC chair. You know, in a cycle where we knew we were gonna have headwinds for the Republican Party, putting somebody forth like that just creates a deeper, a steeper hill for them to climb. We needed probably a more moderate type of profile than somebody who — he did well in the primary, but, frankly, I wish he'd only done 51% in the primary versus 65%. Overachieving there is at the expense of getting your portion of the 40% of people in the state of North Carolina who are not affiliated with either Republicans or Democrats.

Isn't this part of the problem with the Trump era? That the reason why you're left with Whatley is — Tillis doesn't want to run again. He's had enough after two terms. Patrick McHenry, nice career in the House, still a pretty young guy, but you know what? He doesn't wanna deal with this. People are voting with their feet in your party. And they don't wanna get —

Here’s what I was saying. Why would I waste my time running in a primary, which would have been a low turnout — we’d probably have maybe 7% of the electorate come out and vote, and maybe I'd get a little bit less than half of that. I mean, let's face it, everybody's saying, the president, he’s just crushing people in primaries. Take a look at the structure of a primary. If you've got the entire electorate out, I like my chances in a primary.

And why would I waste my time doing that for the privilege of then running in what would have been the most competitive, expensive race in the cycle?

And Roy Cooper's never lost an election statewide for the entire century. That was Cornyn's problem, too, by the way. Senator Cornyn lost that runoff because it was a fractional runoff. 

It was 7% of the Texas electorate. So good on you, Mr. President. You got 4.5%, you know, against 4.25% or whatever the number was.

So play this out to me. So you probably lose the House this year. Senate, you think you got a shot to hang on to. Maybe you hold 50, and Vance breaks the tie. And then maybe the Fetterman trick up John Thune's sleeve. 

And it makes sense for Fetterman, or he's going to be crushed in a primary.

Do you think he should change parties? 

I think it makes statistical sense for him.

So maybe you have a way to hold the Senate, but ’26 will be tough. You've lived through history. Is this a repeat of ’06 and ’08, where 2028 is also going to be a tough cycle? 

Yeah, well, the only way that that changes is if we can have people around the president who say, “You've got to play the hand that's dealt you, and if you double down, you will destroy any chance for us to regain some of our losses from ’26. If, on the other hand, you extend an olive branch and say, ‘The people have spoken, we're going to do things a little bit differently,’” I think that we can take the edge off. But if past is prologue, we're going to double down, we are going to have a two-year pissing contest, and it's not going to end up well for us. Very much like the ’06-’08 cycle, or, if you want to use the Democrat analog, the ’10 and ’14 cycles.

John McCain got handcuffed to George W. Bush in ’08. They were hardly the best of friends. McCain ran against Bush. There was a rivalry there. Democrats just handcuffed Vance, who is the vice president of the United States, to Trump, and it's like calling the same play. And they're running against Trump one last time. 

There's no question in my mind that the president is going to pick the Republican nominee. And if we don't have a very different posture, then that pretty much seals the fate of whoever that nominee is, in my opinion, because that would be another referendum on Trump.

You think Trump doing the coronation would torpedo the nominee? 

Yeah, if you assume that we're not coordinating. The only way that works is if there's a pivot and you start working with a Democratic-controlled House and try to make bipartisan legislation. It's a moonshot and unlikely, but that's the only way I think that you avoid additional electoral consequences in ’28.

So Trump does one-half “The Bachelor,” one-half “The Apprentice,” but it's all a cooked deal. To use one more metaphor, it's the WWF, and he coronates JD, and there's no real primary to speak of. And Trump makes the call, and it's one last Trump election. Vance can’t win that general, can he? With Trump coronating him? 

Now, it depends on candidate quality on their side.

The Dem side.  

I would love for the Democrats to do what they've done in the past.

Try and lose?

They're not going to win this cycle; we're going to lose this cycle.

It's a vote of no confidence on Trump. 

I joked with some of the people on the Senate floor a few months ago. I went over to the Democratic side, some of the more liberal members there, and said, “Guys, I need your help. I need your most liberal people in North Carolina, stat. They need a very clear vision of what DSA and those liberal elements of your party want for North Carolina. I need that for Michael. I need it for everybody up and down the ballot. Can you do that for me? I'll pay their way.”

If they end up nominating somebody who is the darling of that 15 percent of the Democratic Party who actually thinks DSA is cool, then we got a shot. If they get somebody, like one of these moderate governors, and they come out of a primary and they get the nomination, then we got problems in ’28.

I have a theory that a lot of Republicans and even some Democrats secretly aren't that worried about Trump. And frankly, they're not that worried about America sliding into Orbánism because they think, ultimately, Trump's kind of benign, buffoonish, annoying, embarrassing, humiliating and inappropriate. Ultimately, he wants to watch TV, be on TV and do cool stuff like go to football games and have car races and wrestling and fights on the South Lawn of the White House. 

This is not Mussolini. This is more of a P.T. Barnum-type deal, and we're going to be just fine. Is that basically how you feel? 

See, you've actually done a better job of illustrating my point about his advisers being so important because you were absolutely right. That's most what the president wants to do, and if you had people that were executing well on policy and working well with Congress, we wouldn't be where we are, and he could go do that thing.

That is what he likes to do, so you better damn sure have some really good advisers around him executing on the details.

You know him personally; your colleagues do, too. 

Yeah, I like him personally.

I'll just say it directly: Is it reassuring that you basically can tell yourself he's not Mussolini, he's just a bullshit artist, we're gonna be just fine? Is that basically the mentality? 

No, actually, in the first quarter, I was hoping that it was just a little bit of bullshit that we had to work through. But when the bullshit becomes policy, that's problematic — you get this November, this thing that's going to happen 20 days from now, which I have on my countdown clock as “Whoop Ass.”

“Whoop Ass” on the calendar. 

I mean, we've got to be realistic about it. When you deny the reality of things that are measurably true, you hasten their realization.

So the problem is that basically, instead of just doing the UFC fight on the South Lawn, he started trade wars with Canada, which is actually live ammo. 

Oh, yeah, maybe an annexation of Greenland, and an “Open the fucking Straits” on Easter Sunday. All those things —

It adds up? 

It adds up. It adds up in the American mind. The thing about the American people, I love the electorate, they're a pretty kind and forgiving people, but they don't like bullies.

There's a group of our people that love bullying. And there's an element on either end of the political spectrum that loves the bully. Most of the people in the middle don't.

If you could, would you vote for Trump again? 

I probably would. That's assuming he does learn a lesson versus double down on these results. He's reflective. And, you know, he was a Democrat when I was running the conference here to get us into a majority, so go back and touch on some of those roots and figure out a way to find common ground, Mr. President. That's gonna drive some of my far-right people crazy, but at the end of the day, you gotta make lemonade.