Two days after taking another round of jabs from the world’s most powerful person, Thom Tillis was sitting at a high-top table at a pickleball joint in Charlotte on Friday, telling me about a dispute of a different sort.
Here’s how he remembers it: He was in the self-checkout line of the Huntersville Publix a couple of years ago, scanning ingredients for a tortellini and chorizo soup he planned to make for his wife that night, when a stranger approached him and shouted, “Thom Tillis, you’re the most corrupt politician that’s ever gone to Washington, D.C.!”
Tillis, North Carolina’s senior U.S. senator, looked around at a dozen or so other Publix customers, who were now staring at him and waiting for his reply.
“Well,” he said, looking at the man, “you’re an asshole.”
The guy started walking away. A steamed Tillis reloaded his buggy — one of the short ones — and followed the man around the store. In hindsight, Tillis says, he probably looked ridiculous, pushing a little cart while trying to engage with a critic.
“You’ve done so much research about me,” Tillis recalls saying, “you explain to these dozen people why I’m that person. We’ll have a discussion right here.”
Through the dairy section they went. Through the meats. Through the pharmacy. Eventually the man left the store.
“Don’t go away mad, asshole — just go away,” Tillis said.
Tillis, who will retire after this year as one of North Carolina’s most consequential political figures of the past two decades, was telling me this story on Friday while eating a chorizo breakfast burrito at Tipsy Pickle in Camp North End. (His review: An “mmm” and a nod.) He was wearing a white button-down and sports coat, and a pair of green socks designed with disc golfers on them.
Two days before we met, President Trump, frustrated with Tillis because he won’t approve a new Federal Reserve chair, said in an interview that Tillis “quit” and that he’s “no longer a senator,” despite the reality that he is, at least for the next nine months. “Trump-Tillis tiff deepens…” read a FOX News headline. “Republican Senator Ramps Up Fight After Trump’s Baffling ‘Mistake,’” read the Daily Beast.
Tillis laughed when we sat down Friday and I asked, “Are you still a senator?”
“I ended up using the reference from Monty Python,” he said, acting out the famous line from the 1970s absurdist comedy — “I’m not dead yet.”
Since announcing his retirement last summer amid another debate with the president, Tillis has raised his profile. He’s a Republican who makes it clear when he disagrees with the Republican administration. Historically, this wouldn’t make him special, but with this administration and this president, where loyalty is paramount, Tillis has become a sought-after moderate voice. “I am up there, and have always been up there, to call balls and strikes,” he told me.
Tillis said in an interview with NBC last week that he’d lost his filter. But in our hour-long conversation, he was emphatic that the retirement announcement hasn’t changed him. It’s who he’s always been, he says.
“What I would tell the people that maybe like me now, or think they like me now, is to say, ‘Well, you know what, if you’d actually done your homework to begin with, you would have known you would have liked me 20 years ago,’” he said. “Because my behavior hasn’t changed. Your investment and understanding of what I’m doing has.”
And: “What they should do is stop being lazy, and start doing their homework. I’m not going to waste my time on people that form an opinion about me after they read one article.”
It’s why he brought up the Publix story from two years ago.
“That’s how I treat people that don’t do their homework and think that they’ve judged me, and not even shown me the respect to ask me a question,” he said.
“Make a declarative statement, then I’m going to make a declarative statement. You use bad language, I’m using bad language. You get in my face, I’m getting in your face. You poke on my shoulder, I’m poking on your shoulder. You get a foot from my nose, I’m getting six inches from yours. Because that’s how I treat lazy people that try to bully politicians. I give them a look of themselves in the mirror.”
Twenty-three years ago, Tillis launched his political career by winning a seat on the Cornelius town board. The most pressing and controversial issue he faced at the time was the widening of West Catawba Avenue, which included burying power and telephone lines.
The state department of transportation had the project in its pipeline, but not prioritized. Tillis and the Cornelius board devised a strategy to raise taxes briefly to get the project going, then sunset the tax after the state was ready to reimburse them. One opponent of the project was state Rep. John Rhodes, who was known for being an obstructionist and voting no on most things. In 2006, Tillis primaried Rhodes, saying in his campaign that he would do more in Raleigh than vote no, and won.
“Oh, it was gorgeous,” he said. “This was the GOP darling. … So I started my career in legislative politics, speaking truth to power and challenging the norms.”
His point, if you haven’t noticed, is that he hasn’t changed.
Tillis’s team chose the location of our coffee meeting on Friday. Two CMPD officers were there first, to provide security. We were on the porch when Tillis whipped by in his pickup truck with a Panthers sticker on the back window. The parallel parking spots were taken, so he wheeled around and parked clear across the complex in the lot near Statesville Road.
When he finally walked into Tipsy Pickle, the opening riff of Guns N’ Roses “Sweet Child o’ Mine” was blaring from the sound system, and he joked, “I’m completely convinced whoever devised the parking strategy for this place was on crack cocaine. I hope they’re rehabilitating at this point.” Then he looked around at the people playing on the courts and said that he wished he could play pickleball instead of sitting.
He started by saying he has a “great relationship” with the president. He says he texted Trump just last week about the Iran war, to tell him that he supported challenging the Iranian regime but that he needs to see a strategy for exiting the war before it reaches 60 days — when Congress is required to authorize its continuation, or not.
He doesn’t take Trump’s insults to heart, in part because it would get in the way of what matters, he says. He didn’t last year when the president called him a “loser,” and he didn’t last week.
“Let me tell you what I wouldn’t take with a grain of salt,” Tillis pivoted. “You go after my family and call them names, you’re done. Forever.”
In late June last year, as Tillis was signaling opposition to the One Big Beautiful Bill, Trump called to ask him to change his mind. Tillis said he couldn’t because it included healthcare provisions that would strip Medicaid funding from North Carolinians. He says he told the president that he planned to quietly vote no for the Senate version and work with the House on a version he thought was better.
At 3:47 p.m. on June 28, 2025, Tillis issued a public statement saying he would not support the bill because “it would result in tens of billions of dollars in lost funding for North Carolina, including our hospitals and rural communities.”
At 9:48 p.m. that night, Trump dropped a scathing post on Truth Social, criticizing Tillis for not supporting the bill. Tillis’s staff members saw it and screenshotted it. The line that irked him most: “North Carolina will not allow one of their Senators to GRANDSTAND in order to get some publicity for himself, for a possible, but very difficult Re-Election.”
Tillis says the grandstanding line did it for him. He texted Trump immediately after seeing it to say, “Find a replacement for me.”
“The president posted something about me grandstanding, which, in the scheme of things, is not really that bad of a post, except when you’re dealing with somebody like me who expects professional courtesy and respect,” Tillis recalled.
The next day at 4:33 p.m., he announced his retirement.
About 45 minutes later, Trump posted, “Great News! ‘Senator’ Thom Tillis will not be seeking reelection.”
For all the claims of Tillis being “unleashed” or “unfiltered” over the past year, he’s careful about when to criticize Trump directly, and when to criticize the broader administration. His harshest words have come for others:
On the idea of seizing Greenland, he said the president received bad advice from people like White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller. “I’m sick of stupid,” Tillis said.
On Trump’s recent targeting of the Pope, Tillis suggested that the president should apologize.
On January 6, Tillis held the line to defend the officers who protected the Capitol that day, helping to secure a memorial for them. Tillis also blocked Ed Martin, who worked as an attorney for a handful of January 6 defendants, from becoming a U.S. Attorney.
And there’s Kristi Noem, the former Homeland Security secretary. Tillis voted to confirm Noem in January 2025, but soured on her leadership, particularly with regard to immigration, late last year. His public break with her came after the Border Patrol’s raids in Charlotte in November, and sharpened after two civilian killings by federal agents in Minneapolis in January. In early February, he sent her a formal letter demanding accountability on both. In a memorable 11-minute grilling of Noem at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in March, Tillis called for her resignation over her “failure of leadership.”
Tillis and I talked about who he criticizes, and who he doesn’t. I asked what he made of the president’s April 7 post saying a “whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” if Iran didn’t reach a deal to open the critical Strait of Hormuz.
“Horrible words,” Tillis said. But he doesn’t believe Trump meant he would kill all 92 million Iranians, just the regime. “The President needs his advisors to tell him, ‘Mr. President, there are hundreds of millions of people who take every word you utter literally. … You said something that was specifically focused on the mullahs and the people negotiating the bill. What 92 million people in Iran heard is that you’re willing to kill every single one of them to achieve that objective.’ And he’d go, ‘Well, I don’t mean to say that.’ I’m sure that will be his reaction.”
In the NBC interview, reporter Julie Tsirkin pressed him to criticize the president directly; he declined.
“It just proves the lack of experience, lack of insight, or naivete of the question,” he told me. “I mean, my God, he is the CEO of the largest, most complex organization that’s ever existed. And they want to pretend like every damn decision at detail level is made by him. … No, that’s what you hire experts for.”
Few “experts” frustrated Tillis more than Noem.
During CBP’s weeklong operation here in November, officers descended upon immigrant neighborhoods in east and south Charlotte, questioning workers putting up holiday lights and showing up at a school for immigrant children. Twice. Businesses closed and children didn’t go to school. Documented U.S. citizens carried passports with them, just in case they were stopped.
WFAE’s Julian Berger reported last week that nearly half of the 402 people detained that week had no criminal record, despite CBP’s narrative that they were going after the “worst of the worst.”
“That’s what made me angry,” Tillis said in our conversation Friday. “It’s sort of like dumb, B movie, bad police behavior stuff.”
Tillis pressed DHS, under Noem’s leadership, to send him more information about the people detained — who they are, where they are, what caused the encounter — but didn’t receive it. Noem lost the DHS job shortly after the hearing. Tillis says new secretary Markwayne Mullin is “a man of character and principle.” Tillis has asked Mullin to provide an accounting of Charlotte’s Web.
“We may find out we don’t have the information,” Tillis said. “It could be that Kristi Noem was so incompetent that she didn’t, or the people that work for her didn’t, have enough sense to know that if you’re a law enforcement organization, every incident matters. Every incident needs an incident ID. The person that you encounter needs to be identified. The nature of the encounter. Were they legally present? Did they have a criminal background record? Did you detain them? What was the disposition? I want the answers to those questions, and if they don’t have that readily available, I expect them to start tracking things that way.”
Tillis is certain that the reason he hasn’t received answers is that the data won’t reflect positively on the agency.
“The one thing about Washington, and particularly some of the people in this administration, is they love embarrassing people when they’re wrong,” he said. “Now, this is a great opportunity for them, because I’m only working on a hypothesis. I’m working on the hypothesis that the hit rate was so bad here, that’s why they won’t give me the information.
“If she did have a good answer, it’s a great opportunity to embarrass the Senator, right? Well, Senator, yes, we have, we have 500 encounters, 300 of them with thugs. They were horrible people. They’re all being deported. Hell, name 10. That’d be a good start.”
He’s come to Charlotte’s defense in other ways over the past year.
After the murder of Iryna Zarutska on the light rail last August, the president and his supporters trashed the city. Mayor Vi Lyles endured threats and began traveling with more security — despite the reality that in Charlotte’s strong-manager system of government, the mayor has far less power than mayors of other cities.
Even during the State of the Union address in February, Trump said off-handedly, “What’s going on with Charlotte?”
“I made a few phone calls out to people who are making comments like that,” Tillis told me. “They were getting dangerously close to us having to engage in a public conversation, because that’s hurting our brand. North Carolina has an incredible brand. Charlotte has an incredible brand. I mean, we obviously have liberal voices here in Mecklenburg County and on the town council, but I don’t care how people talk; I care about what people do. And fundamentally, we’re a great place to live, work and play.”
While he spoke, the Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” began to play, with the lyrics, “Some of them want to use you. Some of them want to get used by you.”
Despite all of the fights he’s in, and the death threats that have come to him and his staff members, Tillis seems to be enjoying his role as a senator who can block things he finds illogical.
Take the Fed Chair debate. Tillis says he’d be happy to confirm nominee Kevin Warsh, but only if the president’s justice department drops its investigation into current chair Jerome Powell’s oversight of renovations to the Fed headquarters. A Senate Banking Committee hearing, where Tillis has the deciding vote, is scheduled for Tuesday. POLITICO ran a headline last week that said, “Tillis holds the cards in the Trump Fed clash — and won’t fold.”
I asked Tillis on Friday why this fight matters beyond the politics of it, why the ordinary Charlottean should care. He said the investigation into Powell threatens to send a message that the president holds power over the financial system.
“The Fed is not perfect, but the Fed is independent,” Tillis said. “The people on the pickleball court who may have their 401(k)s in the balance need to know that the moment the Fed appears to be serving at the pleasure of the President — whether it be President Trump, President Obama, President Warren, President Mamdani — that it would create swings in financial markets like you’ve never seen in modern history.
“Let’s say they’re playing pickleball at … eight o’clock in the morning, before the markets open. And just before the markets open, we announced that from now on the Fed and all the board members serve at the pleasure of the president. Their 401(k)s will probably evaporate before they can get home, go online, and figure out where to put it.”
Whether you agree with Tillis or not, whether you’re a Republican who thinks he should fall in line with the president or a Democrat who wants him to blast the president directly, he wants to prove to you that the country is still bigger than one person.
His own story is evidence: His family moved nearly 20 times before his 17th birthday, he once told Charlotte magazine. He didn’t immediately go to college, but instead worked in a records warehouse, and later helped index and catalogue thousands of records in a mainframe computer. He eventually landed in consulting with PricewaterhouseCoopers and made partner in 1996, just before he earned a bachelor’s degree. He moved to IBM after that, and joined the Cornelius board. Just before running for state legislator in 2006, his biggest public service job may have been as parent-teacher president at Hopewell High.
Then he won state office and became N.C. Speaker of the House. He’d gone door to door around the state, targeting winnable districts with precision, to help Republicans secure majorities in the state house and senate in 2010, for the first time in more than a century.
And now here he is, one of the most influential politicians in the country, at a critical moment.
He’s 65. He and his wife of nearly 40 years, Susan, have three grandchildren. He was proud to say that his 5-year-old granddaughter had recently removed the training wheels from her bike. Two days after announcing his retirement last June, he blew a kiss to a C-SPAN camera from the Senate floor because his grandchildren had been asking where he was while they were on a family vacation.
Tillis says he plans to return to the business world after he retires from the Senate. He’ll stay on the periphery of politics, he says, by creating an “organization of scale that goes after the extremes” of both political parties. The current political system, with two major parties and a ton of money, leaves moderate campaigns to wilt during primaries.
He’s been labeled too extreme. Too moderate. Too liberal. Too this or too that. In his two local interviews Friday, with me and with WSOC’s Joe Bruno right afterward, he seemed pretty damn done with hearing other people tell him who he is.
That’s why he wants to launch the organization that supports candidates who don’t lock themselves on opposite goalposts.
“It’s rewarding people for having courage, and giving ‘em cover when their parties usually leave them behind in primaries,” he said of the organization he plans to form. “And I don’t care what their ideology is, because I really feel like if we get more members that are willing to consistently legislate within the 35-yard lines of politics, then we’ll produce good outcomes.”
Aside from that, he hopes to resume a fairly normal life in Huntersville. “You’ll see me on a mountain bike. You’ll see me on a disc golf course. You’ll see me playing pickleball,” he said.
When we walked out the door after our Friday conversation, a woman in the Tipsy Pickle balcony hollered down, “Senator Tillis! May I speak with you?”
“If you can be quick,” Tillis said. “I’m late.”
The woman bounced down the stairs and met us outside. She asked him to come upstairs and take a picture with her work group, but he said he couldn’t. So she settled for a photo with just the two of them. He apologized for not being able to stay longer, then looked out across Camp North End and that parking situation and told her, “And I gotta walk about five minutes to get to my car!”
I walked about halfway with him. I asked him once more, “To be clear, you are done with politics?”
“I’m done with politics,” he said. “Everybody talks about how they want term limits, and then they come to me and say, ‘We really need to get you to run again.’ I said, guys, so you want term limits for everybody except the ones you like? We can set examples by just turning things over.”
Then he slipped on a pair of dark Oakley sunglasses and walked the rest of the way by himself.
