Sen. Thom Tillis is preparing to leave the U.S. Senate, but the North Carolina Republican apparently decided retirement needed a book tour, some television appearances and a new insult aimed at people inside President Trump’s political orbit.
Tillis’ forthcoming book is titled “How to Lose Friends and Antagonize Presidents: The Trouble with Sychophants, Courage Outsourcing, and Partisan Groupthink.” According to promotional material cited by Breitbart, the book promises a “bare-knuckled, darkly funny wake-up call” and describes Tillis as “a true conservative who doesn’t mind a good scrap in a Congress that has lost its nerve.”
Nothing says Washington outsider quite like writing a book about Washington after spending years in Washington.
The more provocative part of the promotion, however, is Tillis’ newly coined term for some people surrounding President Trump. According to the publisher, Tillis calls them “MAGATS,” describing what the promotional material characterizes as “a world of grifting sycophants and useful idiots in Trump 2.0.”
That is quite a label for a Republican senator whose party owes much of its modern electoral identity to the MAGA voters being invoked by that little bit of wordplay.
During an appearance on MS NOW, Tillis explained that his criticism is supposedly aimed not primarily at President Trump, but at advisers whom he believes are failing the president.
“The big problem I have with this administration are people who are not protecting the president and are not giving him unvarnished advice,” Tillis said.
He also acknowledged that President Trump “has a right” to be angry with former President Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, while suggesting that “hyper-prosecution” helped President Trump win the 2024 election.
According to Politico, Tillis said the individuals he targets in his book “are not giving the president honest advice and putting us in positions that we could avoid.”
“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,” Tillis said. “Those are the people I want to expose in this book.”
That explanation is more substantive than the juvenile nickname, but it also raises an obvious question. If Tillis wants a serious debate about personnel, policy and presidential advisers, why package the argument with terminology seemingly designed to generate cable-news clips and social-media outrage?
Perhaps because “Senator Has Policy Disagreements With White House Staff” does not exactly fly off bookstore shelves.
Tillis has had several public disagreements with the Trump administration. Politico noted his criticism of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought, Bill Pulte and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller. Tillis also refused to confirm acting Attorney General Todd Blanche until Blanche agreed to eliminate President Trump’s $1.8 billion anti-weaponization fund.
Tillis announced last year that he would not seek reelection after two terms in the Senate. Despite his disagreements with President Trump and administration officials, he says he still wants Republicans to preserve their narrow Senate majority.
Fair enough. Republicans are allowed to disagree with President Trump. They are allowed to criticize White House personnel, question strategy and argue that advisers are giving the president lousy advice. A political party that cannot tolerate internal debate eventually becomes intellectually useless.
But there is a difference between substantive disagreement and turning political frustration into a marketing gimmick.
Tillis says he wants to expose sycophants and “useful idiots.” He is certainly entitled to make that case, and readers can decide whether he proves it. But adopting a deliberately insulting nickname while promoting a book on television looks less like courageous truth-telling and more like the same Washington attention economy politicians routinely claim to despise.
After two terms in the Senate, Tillis is heading for the exit. He apparently intends to make some noise, and perhaps sell a few books, on the way through the door.
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