NC’s Thom Tillis isn’t leaving the Senate quietly. Here are 10 memorable moments
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- He publicly criticized aides and officials for amateurish behavior and poor leadership.
- Tillis warned Trump’s bill could push people off Medicaid and cited national risks.
- Tillis doesn’t hold back now that he’s not running for reelection.
Sen. Thom Tillis hasn’t held back his opinions since choosing not to run for reelection.
He’s been making headlines since last June, for taking shots at Trump aide Stephen Miller; calling on Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to resign; and speaking out against President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill.
In an interview with McClatchy last month, the two-term Republican from North Carolina said that giving up his reelection campaign allows him to speak freely without need to take into consideration how many mailers, town halls and ads his campaign would need to put out to clarify his point to constituents.
“In that way, I don’t have a filter,” Tillis told McClatchy.
The less-filtered version of Tillis has led to funny comments, blunt assessments and tirades from North Carolina’s senior senator.
Here’s some of his most memorable from recent months:
1. On the Senate floor explaining the impact the One Big Beautiful Bill would have on North Carolina’s Medicaid recipients: “What do I tell 663,000 people in two years or three years, when President Trump breaks his promise by pushing them off of Medicaid because the funding’s not there anymore, guys? I think the White House amateurs advising the president are not telling him that the effect of this bill is to break a promise.”
2. On Trump calling him a loser: “I am thrilled about that. That makes me qualified to be Homeland Security secretary and senior adviser to the president.”
3. On Miller’s statement that Greenland should be part of the United States: “I’ve got a couple of buddies that call me cranky. You know what makes me cranky? Stupid. What makes me cranky is people who don’t do their homework.”
4. More on Miller’s Greenland statement: ”I’m also here to talk about what I think is amateurish behavior with respect to the treatment of our NATO allies.”
5. Using what Tillis later clarified was a business term to ask who is responsible if Trump’s plan on tariffs goes wrong: “Whose throat do I get to choke if this proves to be wrong?”
6. Reacting to Trump’s statements that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is a dictator: “But what I’m telling you — whoever believes that there is any space for Vladimir Putin and the future of a stable globe better go to Ukraine. They better go to Europe. They better invest the time to understand that this man is a cancer and the greatest threat to democracy in my lifetime.”
7. Reacting to Noem’s performance: “And what we’ve seen is a disaster under your leadership, Ms. Noem.”
8. Addressing Noem’s leadership: “Those are bad decisions made in the heat of the moment, not unlike what happened up in Minneapolis. We’re an exceptional nation, and one of the reasons we’re exceptional is we expect exceptional leadership, and you’ve demonstrated anything but that in the time that I’ve seen you responding to the emergency in North Carolina and across the southeast and acknowledging mistakes are made and speaking too soon for the expedient of social media or whatever it is.”
9. Responding to now-Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin’s nomination to replace Noem, referring to Noem’s admission that she shot a 14-month-old hunting dog named Cricket: “Another big positive: he likes dogs.”
10. Responding to Trump’s pardons of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists: “We acted on bad advice, we let bad people go, and we sent the message that if you come to this Capitol, and you’ve got the right president in office, he’s gonna let you get past things that any one of us would not get away with if we did it back in our own state.”
This story was originally published April 1, 2026 at 5:00 AM.
