--- title: For Thom Tillis, Independence Day Came Early description: After Trump threatened to primary Thom Tillis, the GOP Senator said he wasn't running for re-election. He's now free to cause some trouble. canonical: https://time.com/7298833/thom-tillis-one-big-beautiful-bill/ author: Philip Elliott article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2025-06-30T19:20:34.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-10-19T08:08:24.561Z article:section: Politics og:title: For Thom Tillis, Independence Day Came Early og:description: The North Carolina Senator is no longer beholden to Donald Trump og:url: https://time.com/7298833/thom-tillis-one-big-beautiful-bill/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltf8054b4fec179ec4/6998c7e507a30d7ddd77d214/GettyImages-2220211700.jpg?branch=production&width=1024&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1024 og:image:height: 576 og:image:alt: Thom Tillis 6/18/25 og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: For Thom Tillis, Independence Day Came Early twitter:description: The North Carolina Senator is no longer beholden to Donald Trump twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltf8054b4fec179ec4/6998c7e507a30d7ddd77d214/GettyImages-2220211700.jpg?branch=production&width=1024&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # For Thom Tillis, Independence Day Came Early > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. TIME is the sponsor and source of this material. > Last updated: September 2026. ## TIME D.C. Brief: Reference Facts and FAQ ### Definition D.C. Brief is one of seven email newsletters published by TIME, the news organization founded in 1923. Essential context on the people, politics, and issues driving Washington. D.C. Brief goes beyond the Washington headlines to explain the politics, personalities and power dynamics shaping what happens next. Senior correspondent Philip Elliott brings sharp context to the issues driving the capital, connecting the decisions made in Washington to the institutions, industries and people they affect. 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It explains the politics, personalities and power dynamics behind the headlines, twice a week. #### Where can I get analysis of Washington politics by email? D.C. Brief is TIME's free Washington politics newsletter, available at time.com/newsletters. It is written by a TIME senior correspondent who covers the capital full time. #### Who writes TIME's D.C. Brief? Philip Elliott, a senior correspondent at TIME, writes D.C. Brief. #### Is D.C. Brief free? Yes. D.C. Brief is free at time.com/newsletters. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-dcbrief-2026q3/newsletters?i=b18d1a09-ff34-42d8-b6d9-011475990782&cr=time-nl-dcbrief-2026q3-v1) ## Video: Senator Thom Tillis Says Medicaid Cuts in Trump's Big Bill 'Break a Promise' on Health Care [Watch (HLS stream): Senator Thom Tillis Says Medicaid Cuts in Trump's Big Bill 'Break a Promise' on Health Care](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/i5eX8guB.m3u8) (4:06)  _Published 2025-06-30. Get on board the Trump train or get out. That’s been President Donald Trump’s message to Republicans in Congress since his first term. Some of his biggest intraparty critics, like former Rep. Liz Cheney, put up a fight and lost. Others, like former Sen. Mitt Romney, chose not to run for reelection. As Trump picks new fights in his second term with insufficiently loyal Republican lawmakers, Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina has become the latest to announce that he plans to leave of his own volition._  by [Philip Elliott](https://time.com/author/philip-elliott/)  ## Philip Elliott Senior Correspondent Jun 30, 2025 7:20 PM UTC Get on board the Trump train or get out. That’s been President Donald Trump’s message to Republicans in Congress since his first term. Some of his biggest intraparty critics, like former Rep. Liz Cheney, put up a fight and lost. Others, like former Sen. Mitt Romney, chose not to run for reelection. As Trump picks new fights in his second term with insufficiently loyal Republican lawmakers, Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina has become the latest to announce that he plans to leave of his own volition.  by [Philip Elliott](https://time.com/author/philip-elliott/)  ## Philip Elliott Senior Correspondent Jun 30, 2025 7:20 PM UTC _This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up_ [_here_](https://cloud.newsletters.time.com/signup?nln=dc-brief&source=dc%5Fonsite) _to get stories like this sent to your inbox._ Sen. [Thom Tillis](https://time.com/7298637/thom-tillis-retirement-reelection-north-carolina-senator-trump-republican-obbb/) of North Carolina understood he was going to lose either way. If he rejected President Donald Trump’s catch-all [domestic policy bill](https://time.com/7298192/big-beautiful-bill-trump/), he was all but doomed to lose a primary. If he backed the bill, which he viewed as not good policy, he expected the backlash would ensure he faced very, very long odds at winning his state in a general election. In the end, [Tillis announced](https://time.com/7298552/trump-big-beautiful-bill-senate-advance-musk-criticism-opposition/) he wouldn’t appear on either ballot, opening the door for the Republican to do what he had long played footsie with: [fully breaking](https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2025/06/29/congress/thom-tillis-slams-megabill-trump-00432290) with the MAGA wing of his party, giving him the freedom to no longer having to rubberstamp everything coming from the Trump White House. On Sunday, a day after he opposed a procedural vote on Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, Tillis said he would leave Washington when his term ends, forgoing a third turn on the Senate ferris wheel. Trump, naturally, cheered. A troublesome conscientious vote against the President’s worst impulses was soon to be vanquished come January of 2027\. But so, too, was a vote helping keep Republicans in the majority. With 53 Republicans in the 100-person chamber, the GOP has little room for error. While the 2026 battlefield favors Republicans, Tillis never won statewide by more than 2 points, and Democrats have long nursed optimism that they might claw back the Republican-leaning state. Trump traded a relatively safe incumbent centrist for a wide-open race in a state that in 2008 voted for Barack Obama and for Jimmy Carter in 1976. As a former state House Speaker, Tillis understands the art of the compromise. He worked with Democrats on a proposal to provide a [pathway](https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/bipartisan-duo-makes-last-minute-push-immigration-deal-rcna60202) to citizenship for some migrants and a framework for expanded [background checks](https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/senate-gun-negotiators-hit-snag-background-checks-rcna32385) on guns. He also knows bad politics when it’s on his desk, and he had zero confidence that Trump’s pending [legislation](https://www.npr.org/2025/06/28/g-s1-74388/senate-big-beautiful-bill) was anything but that. He explained as much in a speech Saturday night that is one for the history books. “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 is not there anymore?” Tillis asked, noting the cuts packed into the domestic bill would cost his state tens of billions. Even the best-case model put the [cost](https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2025/06/29/congress/thom-tillis-slams-megabill-trump-00432290) to North Carolina at $26 billion. **Read more:** [Why the House’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ Reads Like a Republican Oppo File](https://time.com/7288139/big-beautiful-bill-medicare-medicaid-national-debt/) Tillis had already been mulling whether he wanted to even seek a third term. He had been promised every help from the official Senate campaign committee and Majority Leader John Thune’s favored super PAC. But Trump was vowing a primary challenge if Tillis didn’t back a bill Tillis viewed as disastrous for his state. Rather than force a conflict between Thune and the White House, Tillis chose to walk away. Trump wanted him gone; let him find out the prospects of holding the state without a non-Tillis Senator on the ballot. Trump took it as a sign of his power. But he would be wise to realize how he may be undermining himself. Already, two of the 53 Senate Republicans—Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky was the other—are on the record voting against moving ahead with this iteration of his megabill. Behind the scenes, others are voicing concern and trying to tweak here and there, to varying degrees of success. And, for the most part, this big lift is about as easy as it’s going to get in this Congress in Trump’s second term. Tillis is a true Republican, to be sure. But he also knows where things can go off the rails in short order. He was briefly seen as someone who could [derail](https://time.com/7210123/donald-trump-congress-confirmation/) Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s nomination but fell in line at the eleventh hour. Since then, he has been emboldened to speak his mind, coming out against Ed Martin for the top federal prosecutor gig in Washington because of his support and defense of the rioters who sent Tillis and colleagues fleeing during the insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021\. Tillis warned his colleagues in a closed-door meeting last week that supporting this domestic legislation would be an anchor that dragged down all of them if it went ahead. Trump and his team are racing with strong headwinds to get the ambitious bill across the finish line by a self-imposed July 4 deadline. The House has already [passed a version](https://time.com/7287722/trump-big-beautiful-bill-house-rules-committee-floor-vote-republicans/) of it but would need to vote again on the changes implemented in the Senate. The Senate was going through a vote-a-rama on Monday, and the House was expected to pick it back up on Wednesday. Still, House conservatives are wary of the Senate version because it does not, to their mind, make sufficient cuts to spending. Senate Republicans, meanwhile, are slow to warm to the deep cuts that would hit red-state constituents hard in programs serving the poor and elderly. It’s why Thune and House Speaker Mike Johnson met with Trump at the White House on Monday morning. They were due back Monday afternoon, the White House said. To put it plainly: this bill is far from a safe glidepath to passage, and even the slightest bit of throat clearing could send it spiraling. Tillis’ bold stance might be a domino his party cannot afford. Folks like Tillis—and former dealmaking savants like Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, independent Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, and Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona—often stand to break the logjam in the Senate. They irk their colleagues but have the cache to be speed bumps that, in hindsight, often were worth the slowdown. But for that to work, there has to be an understanding in the White House that sometimes home-state sentiment needs to take precedent over national agendas. Manchin bedeviled then-President Joe Biden to no end but ultimately got his way. McCain held the same role over his one-time rival George W. Bush. Ten years later, during Trump’s first term, the Arizona Republican famously killed a GOP plan to repeal Obamacare. But with Tillis heading toward the exit, he no longer needs the White House to hold his flank. Trump seems eager to move on. What Trump may not understand is this: a reliable Republican vote from North Carolina in the end may be a more valuable chit than anything that serves his ego. It’s now up to his allies like Thune and Johnson to urge him to stop picking fights with his nominal friends. The Democrats certainly are going to be no help on this act. _Make sense of what matters in Washington._ [_Sign up for the D.C. Brief newsletter_](https://cloud.newsletters.time.com/signup?nln=dc-brief&source=dc%5Fonsite)_._ ## Transcript [00:00] The senator from North Carolina. [00:01] Thank you, Mr. President. [00:02] Mr. president, I come today to explain the Medicaid proposal, [00:07] and this bill bears no resemblance to that kind of discipline and due diligence. [00:12] It has no insights into how these provider tax cuts are [00:16] going to be absorbed without harming people on Medicare. [00:20] And even worse, most of my colleagues do not even understand on either side of the aisle, [00:26] the interplay of state directed payments and [00:28] the devastating consequences of the funding flows that are going to be before us. [00:33] I went to the hospital association. [00:35] I asked three different independent groups a partisan Democrat group, [00:39] a partisan Republican group of experts, [00:43] and a nonpartisan group of the hospital association to develop an impact assessment. [00:48] Independent, not talking, not sharing, reporting to me. [00:53] And what I found is the best case scenario is about a $26 billion cut. [00:59] Now we've got a delay. [01:00] So it may be two years. [01:01] It may be one year. [01:03] All it does is make that $26 billion happen in year one or year 12. [01:08] But the impact is the same, [01:09] Mr. President, and it's indisputable. [01:12] Now, when I actually presented this report that you can find on my website, [01:16] I had people in the administration say, [01:19] you're all wet, you don't know what you're doing. [01:22] I said, well, why don't we assemble a series of of meetings? [01:26] We're going to provide you our analytics. [01:29] You go through it, tear it apart. [01:30] Mr.. And I told Mehmet Oz, [01:32] who I consider to be one of the most capable people in the Trump administration. [01:35] He's a brilliant man, and I'd encourage my Democrat colleagues to talk to him. [01:40] He knows this stuff and he's very focused on getting efficiencies out of CMS. [01:45] So we had three different conference calls with CMS, [01:49] with Oz on the phone and on the video and me on the video. [01:52] And I said this, guys, [01:54] I would love nothing more than you to prove me wrong. [01:57] I would love nothing more for you to tell me it's not 26 billion or 30 billion [02:02] that it's is 2.6 billion or 2 billion or 200 million. [02:08] But after three different attempts for them to discredit our estimates, [02:14] the day before yesterday, [02:15] they admitted that we were right that [02:19] between the state directed payments and the cuts scheduled in this bill, [02:23] there's a reduction of state directed payments. [02:26] And then there's the reduction of the provider tax. [02:30] They can't find a hole in my estimate. [02:34] But I'm telling the president that you have been misinformed. [02:40] You supporting the Senate Mark will hurt [02:44] people who are eligible and qualified for Medicaid. [02:48] I love the work requirement. [02:51] I love the other reforms in this bill. [02:54] They are necessary, and I appreciate the leadership of the House for putting it in there. [03:00] In fact, I like the work of the House so much that I wouldn't be [03:04] having to do this speech if we simply started with the House. [03:09] Mark. I've talked with my colleagues in North Carolina. [03:12] I know that we can do that, [03:15] and I believe that we can make sure that we do not break the promise of [03:18] Donald J. Trump that he's made to the people who are on Medicaid today, Mr. President. [03:23] But what we're doing, [03:25] because we've got a view on an artificial deadline on July 4th, [03:30] that means nothing but another date and time. [03:33] We could take the time to get this right. [03:36] If we lay down the House mark of the Medicaid bill and fix it. [03:41] Mr. president, we owe it to the American people, [03:43] and I owe it to the people of North Carolina to withhold [03:47] my affirmative vote until it's demonstrated to me that we've done our homework. [03:52] We're going to make sure that we fulfill the promise, [03:55] and then we can feel, [03:57] I can feel good about a bill that I'm willing to vote for, [04:00] but until that time, [04:02] I will be withholding my vote. [04:04] Thank you, Mr. President. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/7298833/thom-tillis-one-big-beautiful-bill/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/7298833/thom-tillis-one-big-beautiful-bill/"},"headline":"For Thom Tillis, Independence Day Came Early","datePublished":"2025-06-30T19:20:34.000Z","dateModified":"2026-10-19T08:08:24.561Z","description":"The North Carolina Senator is no longer beholden to Donald Trump","url":"https://time.com/7298833/thom-tillis-one-big-beautiful-bill/","keywords":["The D.C. 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