North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis announced he would not seek reelection in 2026 on Sunday. He also publicly criticized the president and his support for the Senate’s Big Bill of Absurdities. These things are related.
“Too many elected officials are motivated by pure raw politics who really don’t give a damn about the people they promised to represent,” Tillis said in a statement announcing his impending retirement. It came just hours after casting one of two Republican votes (along with Rand Paul) against moving the bill that will kick 12 million people off of their health insurance and add at least $3.3 trillion to the debt forward to a floor debate.
“It is inescapable this bill will betray the promise Donald Trump made,” Tillis said in a Senate floor speech. “I’m telling the president that you have been misinformed. You supporting the Senate mark will hurt people who are eligible and qualified for Medicaid.”
Tillis is specifically concerned that the bill will kick 663,000 of his constituents in North Carolina off their health insurance; his colleagues, by and large, seem unconcerned with their states’ equivalent numbers. Between Tillis’s vote and his retirement announcement, you will be shocked to learn, came the requisite Trump attacks, including warnings that he would help primary the Senator in his upcoming reelection campaign. “Thom Tillis has hurt the great people of North Carolina. … Tillis is a talker and complainer, NOT A DOER!” he wrote online, among other things. Tillis then proceeded to DO, with his retirement announcement.
There are still a lot of procedural hurdles before the Senate’s bill might make it through, but one might think that Tillis would feel a bit freer to fight back against its obvious malign influence on the entirety of American society whose net worth does not have more than seven zeroes. And though the senior North Carolina senator may have a mildly less MAGA record than some of his colleagues, it might be a mistake to assume too much there — CNN called him a “thorn in Trump’s side,” offering as evidence his opposition to Ed Martin as US attorney for Washington, DC. You might be hard-pressed to find all that many other examples, in particular regarding the nominations of people who might end up being some of the most murderous in American history.
In his floor speech, Tillis was still taking shots at Democrats while decrying the lack of bipartisanship, somehow comparing what would be among the biggest wealth transfers from everyone else to the extremely rich in history to, uh, the Affordable Care Act. Still, getting out of Trump’s crosshairs for the next 18 months does make Tillis at least a mildly interesting wild card.
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