Thom Tillis and the party of surrender

Tillis has the led the NC GOP from the party of Jim Martin to the party of Mark Robinson.

After casting the deciding vote for Pete Hegseth to become Defense Secretary, Thom Tillis is getting a bunch of attention from the media and pundits. He was seen as the lynchpin that could have prevented Trump’s most unqualified and morally compromised nominees from becoming Cabinet members. When he could have shown political courage and leadership, he flaunted his political cowardice and fealty.

Tillis clearly surprised Senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski when he voted to approve Hegseth. After that vote, Tillis made clear he would not cross Trump. Murkowski and Collins withdrew their opposition to the clown car of Cabinet nominees because they couldn’t trust Tillis, leaving Mitch McConnell as the only Republican to vote against people like Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

The Wall Street Journal produced a blow-by-blow of Tillis folding to Donald Trump. Leading up to his latest moral collapse, Tillis put on his VERY SERIOUS PERSON act. He pretended to carefully evaluate the qualifications of the nominees while really only evaluating the political consequences of his vote. He quit the charade after the Hegseth vote and became a cheerleader for Gabbard, RFK, Jr., and Kash Patel, posting photos of himself with each nominee and gleefully touting them. He traded advise-and-consent for bend over and drop trow.

In response to Tillis’ journey from SERIOUS PERSON to Trump lackey, journalist Radley Balko wrote, “[I]t’s hard to think of a more disgraceful example of cowardice than North Carolina Republican Senator Thom Tillis’s behavior during the debate over Trump’s nomination of Pete Hegseth to lead the Pentagon.” Former Republican consultant Tim Miller called Tillis “the most phony member of the United States Senate, which is a pretty high bar.”

Not everybody sees Tillis in that light. His consultant Jordan Shaw told the News & Observer, “Thom Tillis is one of the most transformational, impactful figures in modern North Carolina political history.” And he’s right. Tillis has led the GOP from the party of Jim Martin to the party of Mark Robinson, from the pro-democracy party of Ronald Reagan to the pro-Putin party of Donald Trump.

Tillis’ journey from Reagan conservative to Trump toady mirrors the trajectory of the modern Republican Party. He began his political life as a moderate conservative, more concerned with fiscal issues than cultural ones. He got his start running for city council to get more bike paths in his suburban home on Lake Norman in Mecklenburg County.

Tillis showed ambition when he ran against an incumbent Republican House member in a GOP primary. He won and became leader of his freshman class of legislators. In his second term, he was named minority whip and in his third term became Speaker of the House.

While Speaker, Tillis learned to balance the illiberal instincts of some of the rank-and-file with his more traditional conservatism. He talked the language of free-markets when meeting with business leaders while pushing through a constitutional ban on marriage equality. He supported freedom and discrimination equally. Generally, though, he governed like a Reagan conservative.

Initially in the U.S. Senate, Tillis continued that trajectory and pushed back against Trump occasionally during his first term. According to a Vice article from 2019, “He introduced a bill to protect special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation from interference by the White House. He helped to torpedo Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency nominee. And he pushed a conservative version of immigration reform that would give a pathway to citizenship for DREAMers, while arguing that the solution to border security ‘is not going to be a big, literal physical wall, but rather an all-the-above, all-hands-on-deck approach.’”

A turning point came in 2019 when Tillis wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post opposing a Trump executive order. Tillis said that he would vote against a bill codifying the order, but then voted against himself under pressure from Trump. That scene has repeated itself over and over in the last six yers, most recently on the Hegseth nomination. Today, Tillis, like the rest of the GOP, is completely bowed.

The GOP today is the party of surrender. Once pragmatic and patriotic political leaders have surrendered their morals and dignity to Donald Trump. Trump, in turn, has surrendered to Vladimir Putin. Under Republican rule, we’ve surrendered our place as leader of the free world.

That’s the legacy of Thom Tillis.