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Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina understood he was going to lose either way. If he rejected President Donald Trump’s catch-all domestic policy bill, he was all but doomed to lose a primary. If he backed the bill, which he viewed as not good policy, he expected the backlash would ensure he faced very, very long odds at winning his state in a general election.
In the end, Tillis announced he wouldn’t appear on either ballot, opening the door for the Republican to do what he had long played footsie with: fully breaking with the MAGA wing of his party, giving him the freedom to no longer having to rubberstamp everything coming from the Trump White House. On Sunday, a day after he opposed a procedural vote on Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, Tillis said he would leave Washington when his term ends, forgoing a third turn on the Senate ferris wheel.
Trump, naturally, cheered. A troublesome conscientious vote against the President’s worst impulses was soon to be vanquished come January of 2027. But so, too, was a vote helping keep Republicans in the majority. With 53 Republicans in the 100-person chamber, the GOP has little room for error. While the 2026 battlefield favors Republicans, Tillis never won statewide by more than 2 points, and Democrats have long nursed optimism that they might claw back the Republican-leaning state. Trump traded a relatively safe incumbent centrist for a wide-open race in a state that in 2008 voted for Barack Obama and for Jimmy Carter in 1976.
As a former state House Speaker, Tillis understands the art of the compromise. He worked with Democrats on a proposal to provide a pathway to citizenship for some migrants and a framework for expanded background checks on guns. He also knows bad politics when it’s on his desk, and he had zero confidence that Trump’s pending legislation was anything but that. He explained as much in a speech Saturday night that is one for the history books.
“What do I tell 663,000 people in two years or three years, when President Trump breaks his promise by pushing them off of Medicaid because the funding is not there anymore?” Tillis asked, noting the cuts packed into the domestic bill would cost his state tens of billions. Even the best-case model put the cost to North Carolina at $26 billion.
Read more: Why the House’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ Reads Like a Republican Oppo File
Tillis had already been mulling whether he wanted to even seek a third term. He had been promised every help from the official Senate campaign committee and Majority Leader John Thune’s favored super PAC. But Trump was vowing a primary challenge if Tillis didn’t back a bill Tillis viewed as disastrous for his state. Rather than force a conflict between Thune and the White House, Tillis chose to walk away. Trump wanted him gone; let him find out the prospects of holding the state without a non-Tillis Senator on the ballot.
Trump took it as a sign of his power. But he would be wise to realize how he may be undermining himself. Already, two of the 53 Senate Republicans—Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky was the other—are on the record voting against moving ahead with this iteration of his megabill. Behind the scenes, others are voicing concern and trying to tweak here and there, to varying degrees of success. And, for the most part, this big lift is about as easy as it’s going to get in this Congress in Trump’s second term.
Tillis is a true Republican, to be sure. But he also knows where things can go off the rails in short order. He was briefly seen as someone who could derail Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s nomination but fell in line at the eleventh hour. Since then, he has been emboldened to speak his mind, coming out against Ed Martin for the top federal prosecutor gig in Washington because of his support and defense of the rioters who sent Tillis and colleagues fleeing during the insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Tillis warned his colleagues in a closed-door meeting last week that supporting this domestic legislation would be an anchor that dragged down all of them if it went ahead.
Trump and his team are racing with strong headwinds to get the ambitious bill across the finish line by a self-imposed July 4 deadline. The House has already passed a version of it but would need to vote again on the changes implemented in the Senate. The Senate was going through a vote-a-rama on Monday, and the House was expected to pick it back up on Wednesday. Still, House conservatives are wary of the Senate version because it does not, to their mind, make sufficient cuts to spending. Senate Republicans, meanwhile, are slow to warm to the deep cuts that would hit red-state constituents hard in programs serving the poor and elderly.
It’s why Thune and House Speaker Mike Johnson met with Trump at the White House on Monday morning. They were due back Monday afternoon, the White House said. To put it plainly: this bill is far from a safe glidepath to passage, and even the slightest bit of throat clearing could send it spiraling. Tillis’ bold stance might be a domino his party cannot afford.
Folks like Tillis—and former dealmaking savants like Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, independent Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, and Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona—often stand to break the logjam in the Senate. They irk their colleagues but have the cache to be speed bumps that, in hindsight, often were worth the slowdown. But for that to work, there has to be an understanding in the White House that sometimes home-state sentiment needs to take precedent over national agendas. Manchin bedeviled then-President Joe Biden to no end but ultimately got his way. McCain held the same role over his one-time rival George W. Bush. Ten years later, during Trump’s first term, the Arizona Republican famously killed a GOP plan to repeal Obamacare.
But with Tillis heading toward the exit, he no longer needs the White House to hold his flank. Trump seems eager to move on. What Trump may not understand is this: a reliable Republican vote from North Carolina in the end may be a more valuable chit than anything that serves his ego. It’s now up to his allies like Thune and Johnson to urge him to stop picking fights with his nominal friends. The Democrats certainly are going to be no help on this act.
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