This GOP Senator Isn’t Afraid To Call Out Trump And His ‘Stupid’ Aides

WASHINGTON ― Thom Tillis has always been a bit of a wild card.

With a year left in office, however, the retiring GOP senator from North Carolina is turning up the heat on the Trump administration, in what could become a headache for his party if he were to join Democrats in stymying the president’s agenda on Capitol Hill.

“What’s hysterical to me is how people think that my independence is something new and occurred after I announced my retirement,” Tillis told HuffPost this week. “Just go back to the first administration again. I disagreed fewer times, but I disagreed with advice that the president was acting on. Same thing here. We got to clean up the execution.”

No longer having to run for reelection in a battleground state, however, has freed Tillis to graduate from an occasional irritant (and one who when asked about Tillis at an event in Michigan on Tuesday, insisting that Powell ought to lower interest rates or resign.

In recent weeks, Tillis has railed against three of Trump’s highest-profile administration allies. He called the idea of the U.S. taking Greenland as “stupid” and blasted deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller for giving the president bad advice in a fiery speech on the Senate floor.

He has defended his colleague Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Arizona) from “ridiculous” attacks by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has sought to strip Kelly, a decorated veteran, of his rank and retirement pay after he warned U.S. troops not to follow illegal orders. And he has criticized Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem for rushing to condemn a woman killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minnesota before all the facts were known.

He also joined with Democrats in successfully pushing for putting up a plaque honoring police officers who protected the U.S. Capitol from a mob of Trump supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, in the Senate, contradicting the false narrative pushed by the White House that the Capitol Police were to blame for the riot.

The senator hasn’t shied away from panning some of Trump’s legislative ideas, either, especially if they break with traditional free-market Republican viewpoints. Anyone who supports capping credit card interest rates, a longtime Democratic proposal that Trump called for this week, “is not a conservative that I thought they were,” Tillis said Wednesday.

Yet for all his public breaks with Trump, Tillis does not join Romney or other never-Trump conservatives in criticizing the president’s character, and he maintains that he still supports the president and his agenda. The problem, he argues, is the people surrounding Trump. By calling his aides out, Tillis believes he can play a constructive role to ultimately help Trump be a better president.

“Who on Earth believes that the president could possibly have the depth of expertise to make some of these detailed decisions that he’s making? So, of course, it’s his advisers,” Tillis insisted to reporters on Capitol Hill this week.

“I don’t like arrogance, when somebody thinks, just because they’ve got a title, that they’re more capable than they really are,” he added of Trump’s aides.

A big hole in Tillis’ theory is that Trump himself is pushing for annexing Greenland, a semiautonomous territory that belongs to Denmark, a NATO ally.

But Tillis isn’t convinced Trump’s rhetoric against Greenland merits action from Congress. The senator said he’s not ready to support bipartisan legislation introduced this week by Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) that aims to block any funding for the Department of Defense or the State Department from being used to acquire Greenland.

“I don’t believe it’s a threat. I think the only threat is the bonehead giving the president this advice,” he insisted to reporters on Wednesday.

Tillis’ delicate dance with Trump was on display during the president’s first term in office, as well. In 2019, Tillis briefly faced primary threats after he came out against Trump declaring an emergency as a way to pay for construction of a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. He reversed course after pressure from Trump allies and went on to win reelection in 2020.

Since then, the former North Carolina House speaker has been involved in crafting bipartisan legislation on hot-button issues like gay rights, guns and immigration.

Tillis’ willingness to break from his party hasn’t generated any anxiety within the Senate GOP conference, where he is generally well-liked.

“I just think he’s enjoying the freedom to speak his mind without any political repercussions because he’s not running,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), another bipartisan-minded lawmaker who has hewed close to Trump in recent months as he faces the threat of being ousted in a heated GOP primary this year. “If you had 100 senators who didn’t have to consider political considerations or have to consider getting reelected, I think you’d hear a lot more about [limiting senators to serving] one term.”

“He’s a team player,” added Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), the No. 3 Senate Republican. “Thom Tillis believes in Republican principles, and he’s helped me and others along the way, so I don’t think that he’s fundamentally changing.”

Democrats welcomed Tillis’ growing independence even as they called on more Republicans to stand up to Trump and his growing encroachment on the powers of Congress.

“He is one of the most skilled legislators in a generation or two,” said Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), who is likely to become the next Democratic whip. “I think he’s more worried about what happens in the country than his standing with his conference, and I think his conference still likes him, but they find him telling the truth to be annoying.”