The Roots of Tillis's Spinelessness

Even Washington is beginning to lose respect for Thom Tillis. His independent affectations and gray hair once intrigued the Beltway. But our senator’s fecklessness in the battle over Trump’s Cabinet nominees has revealed him to be a rank opportunist. The core of Thom Tillis is that he is coreless.

Tillis’s cynicism in the confirmation battles has been peerless. He operated assiduously behind the scenes to prevent Pete Hegseth’s confirmation but voted for the unqualified misogynist when Trump threatened to sponsor a primary challenger. It’s worth fully exploring Tillis’s moral cowardice here. As the process went along, Tillis gained enough confidence in the veracity of the allegations against Hegseth that he requested an affidavit from Hegseth’s sister-in-law. This strongly implies that Tillis believed the allegations. By voting to confirm Hegseth, Tillis actively threw a battered woman under the bus despite finding the allegations against her ex-husband to be credible. Tillis’s behavior was far worse than political opportunism.

Thom Tillis’s spineless machinations stand out so glaringly because he likes to portray himself as an independent thinker, a statesman, even. His grandiosity makes the tawdriness of his flip-flops look gobsmackingly contemptible. At this point, Tillis is a more embarrassing figure than Lindsey Graham. A would-be eminence grise has become the subject of scathing condemnations.

But is he not typical of his party and his conference? Tillis’s willingness to flip-flop on anything goes farther than nearly any other senator’s, but his cynicism reflects his exceptional vulnerability as a GOP incumbent in a purple state. The primary (I’m aware of the pun) difference between Tillis and less-blatant opportunists is that he must twist himself so heroically to accommodate political pressures. Almost every Republican senator holds Donald Trump in contempt. The tragicomedy of Thom Tillis emanates from the fact that he faces both the Orange Autocrat’s wrath and the perils of a narrowly divided electorate.

This does not excuse Tillis’s behavior. “Everybody else is doing it” is the excuse of neer-do-wells the world over, and our state’s senior senator has agency. He could do the right thing—without risking his own financial security. After all, before entering politics, Tillis earned $500,000 at IBM. He lives in a 4,800 square-foot house in Cornelius, which is surely more comfortable than a bachelor’s apartment in DC. Yet he waffles.

We have a contemptible senator, a senator whose inconstancy and shameless self-interest render him morally inadequate for high office. Tillis has a grand self-image. But the reality of this man is really quite small. He’s another politician, disrespected by the Big Boss, scrambling to keep a political career at the cost of totally losing his reputation.