Senator Thom Tillis says that without checks on power, “we’ll have some sort of dictator king if we’re not careful.”

As Senator Thom Tillis leaves the Senate, he calls many of President Trump’s advisers “sycophants and calls on his colleagues to stand up to the executive branch as the co-equal branch of government that they constitute.”

The 66-year-old North Carolina senator talks about what he calls the “WTF moments” of the second Trump administration in a new book, “How to Lose Friends and Upset Presidents.” Having served in the Senate during the presidencies of Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Trump, Tillis said he has become increasingly concerned about how the nation’s system of checks and balances is being tested by the outsized influence of the executive branch.

“We will have some sort of dictator king if we are not careful,” he said.

Make the Senate great again?

Recently, the White House has been quick to rule by decree, which has been especially true under the current Trump administration, Tillis said. Presidents, he said, fail to understand that Congress is a co-equal branch that should be treated as a peer and that Congress should act as such.

“I would say the same thing for a Democratic-controlled Senate under Biden and Obama,” he said. “We always make the mistake, when our guy is in power, of passing power to the White House. And I’ve had a real problem with that because it almost always comes back to bite you.”

He writes in his book about the risks of authoritarianism. Tillis said there has been a “steady escalation” within four administrations of presidents ignoring Congress.

“I want checks and balances. I want all three branches to play their individual roles and continue to control power as they have for 250 years,” he said. “I think because we’ve been such a successful democracy for so long, it’s hard for the American people to understand how quickly we can lose everything.”

Tillis’ tightrope act

Tillis was first elected to the Senate in the 2014 midterm elections, just before the rise of Mr. Trump and his populist Make America Great Again movement took over the Republican Party. He said he’s the same kind of conservative now as he was then: “pro-Second Amendment, pro-life, limited government, budget restraint.”

“The only difference between me and a lot of people who call themselves real conservatives is that I have a long list of things that have been ratified and they don’t,” he said.

The senator is now leaving Washington after a series of disputes with the White House. The breaking point, he said, came in June 2025, after Tillis announced he would vote against Mr. Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, arguing that it would keep too many low-income North Carolinians off Medicaid.

Mr. Trump responded by calling Tillis “a talker and a complainer, not a doer,” and threatening to support a primary challenger against Tillis. The senator decided to retire instead of fighting for his seat.

“I respect the president. I still feel like we have a strange relationship, where I clearly made him angry,” Tillis said recently. That was before details of her crude private texts with Trump about what motivated his retirement were leaked, as Tillis included them in her upcoming book.

Tillis said he is not done fighting, recently calling on Trump to fire Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

It should be noted that Tillis voted to confirm all of Mr. Trump’s nominees to the Cabinet, including Hegseth. But he now considers that vote at the start of the second Trump administration his “biggest regret.”

While Tillis says he’s glad “the president went” to Iran, he thinks “they were so caught up after the huge success of the first strike that Hegseth probably didn’t listen to his best military advice and said, ‘Now we should probably take a different posture.’ » »

This isn’t the first time Tillis has attacked a member of Trump’s cabinet. Last March, during a Senate hearing, he launched a scathing criticism of Department of Homeland Security adviser Kristi Noem, denouncing, among other things, the way she handled the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. which went viral, Tillis attacked Noem. “I was thinking about her treating the people who were shot, potentially domestic terrorists,” he said. “It turned out not to be true.”

Two days later, the president fired her.

“I think Noem and Hegseth are probably the role models of men and women who should never have the authority that has been given to them,” Tillis said.

It’s an example of the tightrope Tillis walked during the second Trump administration: saying how much he wants the president to succeed, while placing blame on his advisers and subordinates. In addition to Noem and Hegseth, Tillis is also highly critical of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller for “not going after” Mr. Trump.

Tillis’ Washington balancing act also extends to events of January 6, 2021. The senator is still angry about the attack on the Capitol and the threat to the peaceful transfer of power, calling what happened that day “despicable.” Yet Tillis chose not to convict Mr. Trump after he left office during his second impeachment trial, criticizing the process as rushed and politicized.

“Cutting down the impeachment process to prevent someone from running in the future, I just don’t believe in it,” he said.

An “electoral bloodbath” at mid-term

Asked if he feared a Jan. 6-like backlash if Trump-backed candidates lost their midterm elections, Tillis was grim.

“I think there is a risk. Really,” he said, adding: “It would be another unforced error if we did that.”

Tillis predicts that Republicans are poised for an “electoral bloodbath” in the upcoming midterm elections, with bread-and-butter affordability issues a major concern. Still, he said many of his colleagues were afraid to break with the White House.

In his book, Tillis writes that at least 30 Republican senators have expressed reservations about many of Mr. Trump’s actions, but are generally only willing to speak out privately, fearing that if the president decides to target them, their days will be numbered.

“They don’t want to carry the weight of the president. I get it. You’re running for re-election? He’ll target you in a primary. And so look, you know what all martyrs have in common? They’re dead,” Tillis said. “There have probably been a few instances where if (you) had sort of ripped the band-aid off earlier, then I think we would have had a much better medium-term environment than we’re facing now.”

Read the full transcript of the segment.