Chris Cilizza On Thom Tillis

I'm trying to get my head around this whole Thom Tillis retirement business. After Tillis annmounced that he couldn't support Trump's Big Beautiful Bill, putatively due to Medicaid cuts, Trump posted,

Numerous people have come forward wanting to run in the Primary against ‘Senator Thom’ Tillis,” Trump wrote in another post. “I will be meeting with them over the coming weeks, looking for someone who will properly represent the Great People of North Carolina and, so importantly, the United States of America.

Tillis immediately folded, saying near the end of a rambling statement,

As many of my colleagues have noticed over the last year, and at times even joked about, I haven't exactly been excited about running for another term. That is true since the choice is between spending another six years navigating the political theatre and partisan gridlock in Washington or spending that time with the love of my life Susan, our two children, three beautiful grandchildren, and the rest of our extended family back home. It's not a hard choice, and I will not be seeking re-election.

His tone was rueful. He referred to

working across the aisle in the Senate to pass the largest investment in mental health in American history, passing the Respect for Marriage Act and monumental infrastructure investments, and reestablishing the Senate NATO Observer Group. Sometimes those bipartisan initiatives got me into trouble with my own party, but I wouldn't have changed a single one.

In Washington over the last few years, it's become increasingly evident that leaders who are willing to embrace bipartisanship, compromise, and demonstrate independent thinking are becoming an endangered species.

So the subext seems to be that he'd been digging a hole for himself with Republicans, he knew it, but he didn't have the stomach for the primary fight he almost certainly now anticipated.

So let's move to the video from Chris Cilizza embedded above. Cilizza's career has been uneven. He left a ten-year gig at The Washington Post in 2017 for a step up at CNN, but was laid off there in 2022. More recently he's been pitching himself on YouTube as an "independent journalist", which is to say someone who lost a high-profile network job but hasn't found a new one, just like Megyn Kelly or Tucker Carlson or Mark Halperin.

In the video, he reviews Tillis's opposition to Trump's Big Beautiful Bill. At 1:54:

Tillis voted against it because it has cuts to Medicaid that he said would adversely impact his constituents in North Carolina. Makes some sense, right?

Well, maybe, except that the Medicaid cuts are national, they'll affect people in all 50 states, including the constituents of every Republican senator. He seems to be the only one concerned enough to make the cuts a deal breaker. (Rand Paul, the other Republican "no" vote, thinks spending cuts in the bill don't go far enough.) Why is Tillis the only standout on this issue? And before he went to the Senate, he built his career in North Carolina with a harder line on those same constituents:

In a 2011 speech, Tillis said, "What we have to do is find a way to divide and conquer the people who are on assistance" by getting people who "had no choice" but to receive public assistance "to look down at these people who choose to get into a condition that makes them dependent on the government."

In other words, Tillis has been all over the landscape over his career, and it's hard to deny that some of his positions have been taken from expediency. Cilizza draws a different moral at 4:42:

It is unique to have a President of the United States who simply wants agreement with everythiing he does, even if it is bad politics for a senator or a house member. Trump just wants you to say you support Trump. That's it. So even if Tillis had legitimate worries and complaints about Medicaid cuts impacting his constituents, that doesn't matter to Trump. Trump wants you to be for him. That's it . . . which leaves you basically with two options in the modern-day Republican party, you can one, get on board with Trump always and forever, or two, get out of politics.

He's buying into the stereotypical view that Trump is narcissistic, ego-driven, a my-way-or-the-highway type. Considering Trump's record of success against generally bad odds throughout a political career undertaken as a retirement activity, I think this view is harder and harder to sustain. But now Cilizza contradicts himself. He thinks it's reckless for Trump to drive Tillis out of politics when Tillis is the safest bet to keep that Senate seat Republican in 2026:

And Donald Trump as party leader, his goal shoud be to hold on to as many Senate seats as possible, House seats too, because that's how you retain power in Washington. But I think his real goal is to drive total and complete adherence within the party.

The problem is that if you get too many Tillis-style "independent thinkers" who are " willing to embrace bipartisanship, compromise", especially with the majorities as slim as they currently are, you don't actually retain power in Washington. Hasn't this been the lesson of John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Mitch McConnell? It's pretty plain that Trump's object is to remake the Republican Party, and a big part of that job has been to force certain retirements, so far including Romney, McConnell, and Tillis, with several others still to go.

Cilizza seems oblivious to Trump's purpose here, but even Tillis's Wikipedia entry should make things clear:

In 2014, Tillis announced that he would not seek reelection to the state House, instead running for U.S. Senate against first-term Democratic incumbent Kay Hagan. In the Republican primary, he was endorsed by former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, then-North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory, former presidential candidate Mitt Romney, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The New York Times called Tillis a "favorite of the party establishment."

. . . On May 6, he won the nomination with 45.68% of the vote over Greg Brannon and Mark Harris, described as a victory for the Republican establishment over the insurgent Tea Party movement.

. . . After the release of the Access Hollywood tape during the 2016 United States presidential election, Tillis called Trump's comments "indefensible". According to Politico, he "began the Trump era by negotiating with Democrats on immigration and co-authoring legislation to protect special counsel Robert Mueller" but has increasingly aligned himself with the president due to pressure from his party.

Tillis won both of his Senate campaigns with slim margins, suggesting that he's less of a Republican favorite than someone North Carolinians judge a little less bad than his opponents, and they'll hold their noses and vote for him if that's their only choice. It seems to me that Trump is still feeling lucky, and he may as well gamble that he can come up with a better alternative.