Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., announced in June 2025 that he would not seek re-election. In the months since, his most visible activity has not been legislative work but a media tour for a new book and a viral moment on 60 Minutes in which he jumped across the tracks of the Capitol subway while being interviewed by CBS’s Ross Douthat.
Douthat’s 60 Minutes piece credited Tillis with the jump as a show of energy, framing the 66-year-old senator’s career as a tightrope walk between criticizing President Donald Trump and wanting him to succeed. CBS offered no evidence for that framing, and Tillis did not provide any during the interview.
What the segment left out is Tillis’s record of working against the administration’s legislative priorities. Tillis was part of the Senate Republican effort that stalled the SAVE America Act against Trump’s wishes. He helped sink Trump’s pick for D.C. attorney and then avoided discussing his role. He pushed to preserve Democrats’ green-energy subsidies and Obamacare’s health taxes, supported a path to amnesty for illegal aliens, and criticized Vice President JD Vance’s America First foreign policy.
Tillis has also backed legislation rewriting the legal definition of marriage, supported gun-control measures favored by Democrats, voted to allow transgender-identifying individuals to serve in the military, supported making women eligible for the draft, and backed continued funding to Ukraine.
“Sometimes those bipartisan initiatives got me into trouble with my own party, but I wouldn’t have changed a single one,” Tillis wrote in his June 2025 retirement statement.
In the CBS interview, Tillis said he regretted voting to confirm members of Trump’s cabinet, naming Secretary of War Pete Hegseth specifically. He spent much of the interview discussing the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot, which he called “despicable,” and warned without evidence that Trump supporters might riot if Trump-backed candidates lose midterm races.
“The only difference between me and a lotta people that call themselves true conservatives is I got a long list of things that were ratified and they don’t,” Tillis told CBS.
Tillis’s book, titled “How to Lose Friends and Antagonize Presidents: The Trouble with Sycophants, Courage Outsourcing, and Partisan Groupthink,” frames his criticism as aimed at presidents generally, but its cover features images of several Trump administration officials and allies and does not include Trump himself.
The book’s 166-word description refers to administration officials as “grifting sycophants and useful idiots” and describes Trump allies as “spineless Republican yes-men (and -women)” and “weirdos of the MAGA world.” Tillis has also claimed credit for coining the term “MAGATS,” a label that has circulated among critics of Trump supporters online for roughly a decade.
Tillis took office in 2015 and is not seeking re-election. His retirement statement and recent public comments describe Washington’s partisanship as the reason he is leaving the Senate.
