Why Republican Senator Thom Tillis Is Retiring
Get on board the Trump train or get out. That's been President Donald Trump's message to Republicans in Congress since his first term. Some of his biggest intraparty critics, like former Rep. Liz Cheney, put up a fight and lost. Others, like former Sen. Mitt Romney, chose not to run for reelection.
As Trump picks new fights in his second term with insufficiently loyal Republican lawmakers, Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina has become the latest to announce that he plans to leave of his own volition.
'Great News!' Trump reacted on his Truth Social platform after Tillis announced in a statement that he does not plan to run for reelection in 2026.
'In Washington over the last few years, it's become increasingly evident that leaders who are willing to embrace bipartisanship, compromise, and demonstrate independent thinking are becoming an endangered species,' Tillis said. 'When people see independent thinking on the other side, they cheer. But when those very same people see independent thinking coming from their side, they scorn, ostracize, and even censure them.'
Tillis, 64, said he hadn't been 'excited' about running for another term for some time, and he had reportedly been leaning against running but had given himself until the end of the summer to decide. His decision, however, was apparently made easier after Trump launched a multi-post social-media tirade against the Senator after Tillis voted on Saturday against advancing the President's massive tax-and-spending legislative priority, dubbed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBB).
Trump accused Tillis of grandstanding 'in order to get some publicity for himself, for a possible, but very difficult Re-Election.' He added that he would be 'meeting with' potential candidates to run against Tillis in a primary race. 'Tillis is a talker and complainer, NOT A DOER!' Trump said.
'It's not a hard choice,' Tillis said of his decision to retire from the Senate at the end of his term, saying that he wishes to spend more time with his family instead of 'spending another six years navigating the political theatre and partisan gridlock in Washington.'
Here's what to know.
Who is Thom Tillis?
Tillis was born in Jacksonville, Fla., in 1960. His working-class family, including three boys all named Thomas after their father and three girls, moved frequently when he was a child, and he graduated from high school in Nashville, Tenn., in 1978, voted by his peers as 'most likely to succeed.'
He initially joined the Air Force but was honorably discharged before he could go to basic training, after a car accident severely injured his hand. He instead worked various jobs, eventually working his way to a position at accounting and consulting firm PriceWaterhouse (and later IBM after it acquired PriceWaterhouse), while attending night school at several institutions to earn a bachelor's degree.
In 1998, Tillis moved with his wife and children to North Carolina, and he entered politics in his hometown of Cornelius in 2002, after pushing for a bike trail and being asked to join the parks and recreation advisory board. In 2003, he was elected a town commissioner, and in 2006, he ran and won the Republican primary for a state General Assembly seat, and he ran unopposed in the general election that year and unopposed in three subsequent reelection bids in 2008, 2010, and 2012.
Tillis, who had earned a reputation as pro-business and moderate, was elected Speaker of the state House in 2011, after Republicans won control of the chamber for the first time since 1998.
In 2014, after helping to shepherd conservative legislation in North Carolina's capital, he set his sights on Washington, D.C., running against and ultimately defeating then-incumbent Democratic Sen. Kay Hagan. He narrowly won reelection in 2020 after Democratic challenger Cal Cunningham was caught in a sex scandal.
How did Tillis and Trump fall out?
As a Senator, in terms of leadership and ideology, Tillis has been firmly in the middle of the pack in his party, according to the independent government transparency and accountability tracker GovTrack.
Among other things, he's known for opposing abortion and advocating for corporate tax cuts. And he's supported every conservative Supreme Court justice nomination before him. But he's also been unafraid to cross party lines on issues including gun control and immigration.
Tillis has also been known to occasionally butt heads with Trump.
In 2016, when Trump had become the presumptive GOP nominee for President, Tillis called on Republicans to support Trump. 'We have to recognize that more than anything else, we have to unite,' he said at the time. 'At the end of the day, we're all Republicans.' He would later criticize Trump's controversial comments on an Access Hollywood tape as 'indefensible' and said Trump should 'apologize to women everywhere,' though he continued to back the candidate.
In 2017, he supported the appointment of Robert Mueller as a special counsel to investigate Trump and later co-sponsored a bill with Delaware Democrat Sen. Chris Coons to protect Mueller from interference by the President. Pushing back against criticism from other Republicans, he told Politico in 2018 that he wanted to take a stand against 'situational ethics' in which politicians change their stances based on who is occupying the White House. 'Courage is when you know you're going to do something that's going to anger your base,' he said.
In 2019, Tillis wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post to criticize Trump's declaration of a national emergency to divert funds to border control. 'I cannot justify providing the executive with more ways to bypass Congress,' Tillis wrote at the time, citing conservatives' past opposition to former President Barack Obama's executive actions on immigration. 'There is no intellectual honesty in now turning around and arguing that there's an imaginary asterisk attached to executive overreach—that it's acceptable for my party but not thy party.' (A few weeks later, however, he backed down and supported the emergency declaration.)
Trump went on to endorse Tillis ahead of his challenging reelection contest in 2020, saying that the Senator 'really stepped up to the plate,' and Tillis voted against Trump's impeachment that year, saying it was 'motivated by partisan politics and a desire to remove the President from office instead of allowing the American people to decide his fate at the ballot box in November.'
In 2021, following the Capitol riot, Tillis voted against Trump's second impeachment on charges of incitement of insurrection, though he would later call Jan. 6 'a dark day in American history' and said that many involved needed to be held accountable and 'go to prison.'
At the start of Trump's second term, Tillis called Trump's blanket pardon of Jan. 6 participants 'a bad idea.'
Tillis also dashed Trump's nomination of Ed Martin to be U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. Martin previously made inflammatory comments about the Jan. 6 Capitol riots and had come to the rioters' defense. Tillis' opposition effectively killed Martin's nomination in the Senate Judiciary Committee, earning the ire of Trump's MAGA base.
Tillis drew further criticism from the right when he scrutinized the nomination of Pete Hegseth to become Defense Secretary, though he ended up supporting Hegseth's confirmation, which passed on a tiebreaker vote by Vice President J.D. Vance.
Tillis and Trump's relationship finally broke over the controversial tax-and-spending package, which is estimated to add trillions of dollars to the national debt and lead to significant Medicaid cuts.
'I did my homework on behalf of North Carolinians, and I cannot support this bill in its current form,' Tillis said in a statement on June 28. 'It would result in tens of billions of dollars in lost funding for North Carolina, including our hospitals and rural communities.'
After Tillis and fellow Republican Sen. Rand Paul voted with Democrats against a procedural advancement of the bill, which narrowly passed, Trump lashed out on social media against the pair. He previously launched a similar campaign against Republican holdout in the House Thomas Massie.
Why does Tillis' retirement matter?
Whereas Massie will likely face a difficult primary challenge supported by Trump that will focus on his opposition to the OBBB, by not running for reelection, Tillis will face no electoral repercussions for remaining outspoken against the bill.
Tillis said in his statement announcing his retirement that, over his remaining year-and-a-half remaining in office, he plans on 'focusing on producing meaningful results without the distraction of raising money or campaigning for another election. I look forward to having the pure freedom to call the balls and strikes as I see fit and representing the great people of North Carolina to the best of my ability.'
And he started on Sunday night, when he took to the Senate floor to deliver a scathing rebuke of the OBBB.
'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's not there anymore?' he said. Tillis compared Trump's campaign promises not to cut Medicaid to Obama's notorious 'if you like your health care plan, you can keep it' unkept promise about the Affordable Care Act.
Tillis added: 'Mr. President, we owe it to the American people and I owe it to the people of North Carolina to withhold my affirmative vote until it's demonstrated to me that we've done our homework.'
Tillis' decision to not run for reelection comes as Democrats seek to challenge Republicans' dominance in Congress in the upcoming midterms. Former Gov. Roy Cooper is expected to present Democrats with the best chance of flipping the seat, though he has not yet officially entered what is expected to be a 'blockbuster race.'
For his part, Tillis has said he still wants Republicans to win in 2026, but on social media he offered some advice to Trump about his potential replacement: 'Word to the wise, let's avoid minisoldr,' he said, using the reported username of former Trump-endorsed North Carolina gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson, who was embroiled in scandal after CNN reported he'd made lewd and inflammatory comments on a pornography website, including referring to himself as a 'perv' and a 'Nazi.'
But Trump could get behind someone much closer to home: His daughter-in-law Lara Trump is reportedly 'seriously considering' entering the race, just days after her husband Eric told the Financial Times that he could see himself running for President one day.
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