The GOP establishment wants to settle scores with President Trump.
The timing couldn’t be worse.
And a RINO turncoat just stabbed Trump in the back in one unspeakable way.
What Tillis Is Selling and Who He’s Targeting
Retiring RINO Senator Thom Tillis is out with a new book that trashes Trump and his inner circle as Tillis slinks towards the exits.
The book is titled How to Lose Friends and Antagonize Presidents and is the typical Never Trump screed that smears the administration with left-wing talking points.
The book’s cover prominently features White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, and former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem.
So Tillis put Robert F Kennedy Jr on his book cover as a target. Kennedy, who left a Democrat Party that had abandoned its own principles to fight for medical freedom and transparency in government health agencies, gets lumped in with people Tillis considers bad actors. That tells you something about where Tillis is really coming from.
On MS NOW, Tillis said those individuals “are not giving the president honest advice and putting us in positions that we could avoid,” adding: “I’m talking about people who have never worked a day in business, who now have business strategy, decision-making roles, and they’re simply not looking around corners and taking care of this president.” He said: “Those are the people I want to expose in this book.”
The two-term Senator went on to describe the Trump administration as a “difficult administration to work in,” and added: “The big problem I have with this administration are people who are not protecting the president and are not giving him unvarnished advice.”
And when asked point blank whether Trump himself deserves any blame, Tillis sidestepped the question by comparing the president to a CEO who doesn’t have “expertise in all manner of an organization.”
Tillis said: “I want Republicans to win in November. That’s why I’m speaking out. I’m here for the American people, not to score points with Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth or these other folks who I think are giving the president bad advice.”
That’s a convenient line. But there’s a backstory worth knowing.
How Tillis Got Here
Tillis is not seeking re-election after Trump effectively forced him into retirement.
Tillis announced he won’t run for re-election after voting against President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.” Trump had passed the most significant domestic policy legislation of his second term, and Tillis was one of the Republicans who tried to kill it.
When the Senate passed the bill on July 1, Tillis was one of three Republicans who voted against it.
Trump reacted on Truth Social. He wrote: “Thom Tillis is making a BIG MISTAKE for America and the Wonderful People of North Carolina.”
And that was that. The next day Tillis announced that he won’t seek reelection in 2026.
In an appearance on Morning Joe, Tillis said he was proud to “stick a fork” in the 1776 Fund, which was part of a settlement President Trump’s lawyers reached with the Internal Revenue Service after a contractor leaked tax returns to news organizations.
That’s the same Morning Joe that spent years cheerleading for every investigation into Donald Trump. Tillis fit right in.
What This Really Is
Let’s be direct about what’s happening here. Republican Michael Whatley and Democrat Roy Cooper are locked in a competitive race to succeed Tillis in the seat. Tillis just handed every left-wing media outlet in the country a gift-wrapped Republican willing to go on camera and call Trump’s cabinet “grifting sycophants” right before a midterm election.
That’s not courage. That’s a book deal.
The publisher’s promotional copy promises that “fear, outsourced courage, and groupthink are hollowing out the party that Tillis spent much of his adult life building.” But Tillis spent years in Washington accommodating the same establishment forces that made that groupthink possible. He’s not diagnosing a problem he was separate from. He was part of the institution he’s now critiquing, right up until the moment it stopped working for him.
And the choice of targets is telling. Pete Hegseth has pushed hard to clean up a Defense Department that had spent years prioritizing woke ideology over combat readiness. Robert F Kennedy Jr walked away from the Democrat Party to fight government health bureaucracies that crushed dissent during the COVID era and locked Americans out of decisions about their own bodies. These are not grifters. These are people who made real enemies in Washington by actually doing what they said they would do.
Tillis calling them “MAGATS” on the cover of a HarperCollins book, promoted on MSNBC, tells you whose team he’s really playing for in his final months in office.
North Carolina voters who sent Tillis to Washington twice deserved better than a farewell tour on Morning Joe. The seat he’s vacating is now a genuine battleground, and the book he’s releasing is going to be used as ammunition against every Republican running in 2026. That’s the legacy Thom Tillis chose.
But the America First movement has seen this pattern before. A Republican who spent years clashing with the president’s agenda, got pushed out, and now wants credit for being the brave one. The voters who gave Trump his mandate in 2024 didn’t send anyone to Washington to write a book about how the people carrying out that mandate are the problem.
They sent them to get things done. Tillis didn’t. And now he’s cashing out.
Sources: Breitbart, The Daily Beast, HarperCollins/Amazon book summary, Yahoo News, WLT Report, Joe My God, ABC11 Raleigh-Durham, The Assembly NC