‘I’m not grouchy, I’m just optimizing’: Thom Tillis doesn’t want to hear he’s not doing enough to challenge Donald Trump

By Lauren Fox, CNN

(CNN) — To hear Thom Tillis tell it, there was a world where he might not have decided to retire from the US Senate. At least not in that exact moment.

He had been thinking for a while about retiring and had a late phone call with the president after deciding not to vote for his “big, beautiful bill” last June. The call had been tense. And as it ended, he’d texted his staff to be ready with a draft retirement announcement.

Before he made the final decision, he wanted to sleep on it.

Then, came a rapid-fire series of attacks from President Donald Trump on social media.

“I didn’t talk to my wife. I just made the call right then in the moment. That’s the way I operate,” Tillis told CNN in a recent interview in his office at the US Capitol. “That was a forecast of what came next. And I just wanted to make it very clear, nobody has ever had a positive experience flexing with me, ever. And I didn’t want to break my streak.”

In the months since, Tillis has emerged as one of the few Republicans in the Senate GOP regularly willing to criticize the White House, haranguing Trump’s staff for “not looking around corners” and not giving sound advice to the president.

When CNN caught up with Tillis in his Dirksen office, hours before he was scheduled to leave for the Munich security conference, the North Carolina Republican was relaxed, leaning back in a dark leather chair, hands clasped as he mused on the liberation and productivity that comes when looking at the calendar and realizing you have just under a year left in what is supposed to be the world’s most deliberative body.

He hasn’t slowed down his whirlwind farewell tour in the weeks since. On Wednesday during a hearing with Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Tillis demanded her resignation, blasted her decision to shoot her 14-month-old dog and threatened to hold up Trump’s nominees coming through the Senate and deny his committees a quorum if she didn’t respond to his questions – some of which her agency’s own inspector general has asked.

Since announcing his retirement, Tillis has vowed to block Trump’s nominee for Federal Reserve chair unless his administration drops an investigation into current chair Jerome Powell. And he calls recent efforts like one to indict two fellow senators – Democrats Mark Kelly and Elissa Slotkin – “threatening the president’s legacy.”

But Tillis views himself as a very different kind of hill antagonist than those who attempted it before him. Criticisms from Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney (which the senator argued were at times “unwise and unfair”) centered on fears that Trump himself was an existential threat to American Democracy. Republican Reps. Thomas Massie and Marjorie Taylor Greene, meanwhile, challenged the president from the right. Still others who speak out against the administration’s actions largely do so in private or under the veil of anonymity.

Instead, Tillis maintains he still has a working relationship with the president (they texted just days before the interview) and that his outspoken ridicule of Trump’s staff is meant to motivate, not alienate, the president. Tillis wants Trump to make personnel corrections that protect his legacy and the future of his majority in Congress.

“I told the president if I prove anything to him or nothing else over the next 18 months … I hope I prove to you I care more about your legacy than a lot of these people that are giving you bad advice,” he said.

In a world, however, where Trump requires almost-absolute allegiance to stay in his good graces, Tillis is no doubt stretching the outer limits of what it means to be a MAGA-aligned Republican in today’s GOP, forcing the question of how long a Republican senator in Washington can throw stones from inside the party’s tent.

“I’m going to maintain a great relationship with him for as long as I can. But if the relationship goes bad, it won’t be because of anything I said or did first,” Tillis said.

Tillis has been in Washington since 2015 and when he ran for reelection in 2020, he squared off against Democratic candidate Cal Cunningham in what was at the time one of the most expensive Senate races in the country. Tillis said he’d estimated the cost of another reelection would mean he’d need to raise at least $50 million. For months leading up to his decision to retire, Tillis wasn’t shy with donors (much to the chagrin of his political team) that he was going to do a lot of thinking before committing to another rigorous cycle.

“He was speaker of the state house and then went from being speaker to being a Senate candidate. It has been a heavy grind for him for a long time,” said longtime friend, North Carolinian and former Rep. Patrick McHenry. “This year he has realized he can have a lot fun before he heads out the door. … He is not trying to burn people, but he is doing a lot of singeing that is for sure.”

Tillis rejects the premise he is a different lawmaker now, noting that he got into state politics by challenging a sitting Republican assemblyman John Rhodes in the GOP primary in 2006. Tillis also points out he’s been at the center of some of the biggest deals Congress has cut over the last several years, from gun reform to a bill that gave same-sex and interracial couples protected legal status under the law – both of which required challenging standard party orthodoxy and landed him with a censure back home.

Yet, he doesn’t deny that dropping the reelection pressure has afforded him more flexibility than he has had in awhile. And no, it doesn’t just apply to hallway quips about top Trump aide Stephen Miller.

“I made the personal assessment that I could probably be more productive being unmoored by all the overhead and distraction of running and having to, you know, thread the needle on messaging,” Tillis said of his ultimate decision to hang it up after this year.

Pushed about critics who accuse him of only speaking more freely now that he’s not free from reelection pressures, Tillis has a simple retort: “It’s like no shit, Sherlock.”

He also has little patience for Democrats who argue that Republicans aren’t doing enough to call out their president publicly.

“I like these folks, but I tell them the same thing. I said, ‘You guys signed a letter when we had the courage to tell President Trump that we wouldn’t nuke the filibuster, and two f**king years later, you voted to nuke the filibuster, and you’re gonna tell me how I should behave? Come on, guys, I’m not grouchy. I’m just optimizing,’” he said.

In the last several months, Tillis hasn’t just played rhetorical hardball, he’s deployed exacting tactics to realize some of his legislative goals as well. In pursuit of getting the Lumbee Tribe federally recognized benefits, an effort that has been stuck for decades, the senator leveraged his relationships with the White House and pushed for the Lumbee Fairness Act to be included in the must-pass defense policy bill at the end of last year. When Mississippi senators, including Roger Wicker, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee governing the NDAA, opposed the move, Tillis held up Mississippi’s judicial nominees in the Senate Judiciary Committee until Wicker relented.

“Thom Tillis is a good man. Sometimes we do things that aren’t appreciated by all of our colleagues, but I really like Thom Tillis,” Wicker said. “He ruffled some feathers before he announced his retirement and he’s ruffled some since, but he’s a good man.”

In his role on the Senate Banking Committee, Tillis has threatened to block the nomination of Kevin Warsh -– or any other nominee -– to be the next fed chair until the Trump administration drops its investigation into Powell, a major play that could undermine one of Trump’s biggest goals of significantly lowering interest rates in the country.

Tillis says he can’t remember talking to the president directly about his position on Warsh but that he and Trump have talked several times since he leveled the threat.

Tillis isn’t revolutionary in his tactics, he’s deploying tools available to every single senator in a chamber designed to allow any one member – especially those in the majority – to exercise immense influence over nominations, legislation and the speed at which the chamber can conduct routine business. And yet in his final year in office, colleagues have observed Tillis is playing the game better than most in his party.

“I would say for most of the last year, most of my colleagues have swallowed their concerns about nominees, about policies and about the president’s conduct and statements,” Sen. Chris Coons, a Democrat from Delaware, said. “He’s never had a problem standing up and saying this is wrong when something is wrong.”

Still, Tillis is cautious about never pointedly going after Trump.

From the aftermath of a second fatal shooting by federal agents in Minnesota to the administration’s threats to take Greenland to a failed effort to secure a federal grand jury indictment of sitting members of Congress, Tillis maintains the president is getting some “bad advice” from “these 30 and 40 somethings like Stephen Miller.”

“You honestly think they’re going to be taking care of the presidential library a few years from now? No, they’re going to be riding the next horse or the next thing to get them money, fame, power, whatever they want,” Tillis said during the interview.

Circling back to frustration over Trump’s staff again later in the interview, Tillis laid it out again.

“I don’t like sycophants. I don’t like people giving me self-affirming messages. I don’t need them. I’m comfortable with myself. But, you know, maybe the president is getting hammered every day. He needs a few of those people around him [to] kind of keep his energy up, but right now, he’s got too many around him.”

Tillis has an explanation for why he doesn’t spar with Trump directly.

“I don’t criticize him, because I expect these people to protect him. I expect them to increase his batting average. I expect them to advance policies that make it more likely that Republicans can win in tough states like North Carolina, Maine, Ohio, Alaska, and I get really angry when I see amateurish policies that are attention getting having no respect whatsoever For the downstream political consequences of people in Congress,” Tillis said.

Regardless of if Tillis’ most recent Trump administration truth tour is enough or too little to satisfy his colleagues on the other side of the aisle, there’s no doubt the North Carolina senator is unencumbered in a way he could not be a little over a year ago.

Last January, Tillis was the subject of an intense lobbying effort to get him to “yes” on Trump’s Defense secretary nominee Pete Hegseth. Tillis had reservations and at one point pushed Majority Leader John Thune to delay a vote on his nomination. Thune rebuffed him, arguing that if he had direct concerns, he should take them to the White House. Tillis did. He attempted to contact and corroborate allegations of impropriety against Hegseth, which he denied.

“To his credit, I put [Hegseth] through some pretty grueling face-to-face discussions, and he maintained his composure well, which gave him a little bit more credit in my mind while I’m also trying to figure out whether or not somebody would really step forward, and they didn’t,” Tillis said of the episode.

Since his vote, Tillis has expressed frustrations with Hegseth’s management of the Pentagon, from his use of Signal to discuss plans for an attack in Yemen to telling CNN last year the defense secretary had a “mixed report card.”

But if there is part of Tillis that regrets his choice to back Hegseth or would make another decision now, you’re not going to hear about it.

The only thing that keeps him up at night? “Coffee,” Tillis quips.

As for the president’s quips about the senator, Tillis has tried to make light of it all. When Trump called him a “loser,” he said he was “thrilled” because it meant he was qualified to serve as homeland security secretary or the president’s senior adviser.

But there are limits to how much Tillis may be willing to take.

“In truth, he hasn’t really been that unkind,” he said of Trump. ”But I am very strait-laced about that, and I just don’t deal with it. I don’t deal with it with anybody.”

“I don’t care if it’s somebody that I encounter at Reagan National Airport or the president of United States. You either treat me with respect, and if you give me unwarranted angst, you’re likely to get the same in return.”

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