As Senator Thom Tillis leaves the Senate, he criticizes many of the advisers President Trump has surrounded himself with as “sycophants and calls on his colleagues to confront the executive branch as the co-equal branch of government that they are.” The North Carolina senator, 66, talks about what he calls the “WTF moments” of the second Trump administration in a new book, “How to Lose Friends and Antagonize Presidents.” Having served in the Senate under Barack Obama, Joe Biden and both Trump presidencies, Tillis said he is increasingly concerned about how the nation’s system of checks and balances is being tested by the outsize influence of the executive branch. “We’ll have some kind of dictator king if we’re not careful,” he said. Make the Senate great again? All recent White Houses have been eager to govern by executive order, something that has been especially true during the current Trump administration, Tillis said. Presidents, he said, don’t understand that Congress is an equal branch that should be treated as a peer, and that Congress should act as such. “I would say the same thing about the Democratic-controlled Senate under Biden and Obama,” he said. “We always make the mistake, when our man is in office, of passing power to the White House. And I’ve had a real problem with that because it almost always comes back to haunt you.” Senator Thom Tillis writes in 60 Minutes in his book about the risks of authoritarianism. Tillis said there has been a “steady escalation” in four administrations of presidents ignoring Congress. “I want checks and balances. I want all three branches to play their individual role 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 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, fiscal restraint.” “The only difference between a lot of people who call themselves conservative and me is that I have a long list of things that were ratified and they didn’t,” he said. The senator is now leaving Washington after a series of fights with the White House. The breaking point, he says, came in June 2025, after Tillis announced he would vote against Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, arguing that it would kick too many low-income North Carolinians off of Medicaid. Trump responded by calling Tillis “a talker and a complainer, not a doer” and threatening to endorse a primary challenger against Tillis. The senator decided to retire rather than fight for his seat. Senator Thom Tillis shows Ross Douthat a January 6, 2021 plaque honoring the Capitol Police. 60 Minutes “I respect the president. I still feel like we have a strange relationship, where I’ve clearly made him angry,” Tillis said recently. That was before details of his profanity-filled private texts with Trump about what led to his retirement were leaked, because Tillis included them as part of his upcoming book. Tillis said he’s not done fighting and recently called on Trump to fire Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. It should be noted that Tillis voted to confirm all of Trump’s Cabinet nominees, including Hegseth. But he now considers that vote at the beginning of the second Trump administration to be his “biggest regret.” While Tillis said he’s glad “the president went in” to Iran, he believes “they got so caught up after the immense success of the first strike that Hegseth probably didn’t listen to their best military advice and said, ‘Now we should probably take a different stance.'” This is not the first time Tillis has gone after a member of Trump’s cabinet. Last March, at a Senate hearing, he sharply criticized Department of Homeland Security adviser Kristi Noem, denouncing, among other things, her handling of the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. That went viral, Tillis attacked Noem. “I was thinking about her calling people who were shot, potentially domestic terrorists,” he said. “That has been proven not to be true.” Two days later, the president fired her. “I think Noem and Hegseth are probably the example 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 has walked in the second Trump administration: saying how much he wants the president to succeed, while shifting blame to 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 looking around the corners” for Trump. Tillis’s balancing act in Washington also extends to the 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.” Still, Tillis decided not to convict Trump after he left office during his second impeachment trial, criticizing the process for being rushed and politicized. “Cheap the impeachment process to prevent someone from running in the future, I just don’t believe that,” he said. Senator Thom Tillis is sitting in his office. 60 Minutes An ‘electoral bloodbath’ in the midterms When asked if he fears a backlash similar to the one on January 6 if Trump-backed candidates lose their elections during the midterms, Tillis sounded somber. “I think there’s a risk. I really do,” he said, adding: “It would be another unforced error if we did it.” Tillis predicts that Republicans are about to suffer an “electoral bloodbath” in the upcoming midterm elections, with the main concern being the issue of bread and butter affordability. Still, he said many of his colleagues are afraid to break with the White House. In his book, Tillis writes that at least 30 Republican senators have expressed reservations about many of Trump’s actions, but are generally only willing to speak privately, fearing that if the president decides to attack them, their days will be numbered. “They don’t want to bear the weight of the president. I get it. Are you running for re-election? He’s going to attack you in the primaries. And look, do you know what all the martyrs have in common? They’re dead,” Tillis said. “There were probably some cases where if [you] “If we ripped the Band-Aid off early, then I think we would have had a much better midterm environment than we’re facing now.” Read the full transcript of the segment. More from CBS News Go deeper with The Free Press in:
