U.S. Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) looks on in Capitol Hill, as Republican lawmakers struggle to pass U.S. President Donald Trump’s sweeping spending and tax bill, in Washington, D.C., U.S., June 30, 2025.
President Donald Trump has a remarkable tendency to humiliate and politically ruin Republican lawmakers who stand up to him, and then still rely on those same legislators to do his bidding. On Monday, a conservative writer analyzed two of the most conspicuous cases of Trump doing this — with Sens. Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana.
“I missed the news last week that a U.S. senator has a book coming out in October titled ‘How to Lose Friends and Antagonize Presidents’, in which Pete Hegseth (among others) is derided as a ‘MAGAT,’” wrote The Dispatch's Nick Catoggio on Monday. “The author? Republican Thom Tillis.”
Catoggio added, “Memoirs by modern American politicians are notoriously leaden, reflecting the quality of our leadership class. But I might pick this one up out of pure curiosity about the premise: In what way, I’m dying to know, has Tillis meaningfully ‘antagonized’ Donald Trump?”
He continued, “He voted to acquit the president at both of his impeachment trials. He supplied a critical vote last week to advance Todd Blanche through the Senate Judiciary Committee. And when the nomination of Defense Secretary MAGAT was hanging by a thread, it was Thom Tillis who rescued him by casting the 50th vote needed for confirmation.”
Although Tillis stood up to Trump by trying to get him to drop his investigation into former Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell lest he stop Kevin Warsh from being confirmed as his replacement, Catoggio noted that Trump is still using lawfare to persecute Federal Reserve officials. The conservative then turned his sights on Cassidy.
“Last week Sen. Bill Cassidy achieved the distinction of casting his second deciding vote in favor of a grotesquely unfit Cabinet nominee,” Catoggio wrote. “The first was his support for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, a vote that leveraged Cassidy’s authority as a medical doctor to provide cover for other wary Republicans to vote yes.”
He added, “That vote was morally indefensible but legible as a matter of expedience: The senator had a primary coming up in Louisiana and plainly hoped that backing RFK would cause the president to forgive him for voting to convict at Trump’s second impeachment trial. It did not.”
Catoggio described Cassidy’s position as one that “smells of helplessness. Rarely does a U.S. senator signal ‘no confidence’ in an administration led by his own party, as Cassidy clearly did in his damned-with-faint-praise argument for Blanche that the next nominee could be worse. But when it does happen, it typically doesn’t come packaged with a sense of fatalistic resignation that Congress has no power to compel the president to nominate more suitable public servants. And so the case for Blanche boils down to this: There needs to be someone by the president’s side who might restrain his malfeasance because, Lord knows, Senate Republicans aren’t going to.”
He concluded, “They’re not going to impeach Trump or Blanche or some worse-than-Blanche replacement as attorney general, no matter what high crimes they might commit. So the best the world’s greatest deliberative body can do is give the president the mafia consigliere he wants and hope that that person can dissuade him from the sort of Rubicon-crossing authoritarianism that the Senate is too cowardly and partisan to prevent.”
Catoggio is not the only commentator to slam Cassidy. After Cassidy denounced RFK Jr. and Trump for an executive order that gets rid of vaccines, NOTUS columnist Matt Lewis wrote on X that “if only someone could have predicted that the assurances to secure your confirmation votes were BS…”
Similarly the anti-Trump conservative organization Republicans Against Trump declared, “You voted for RFK Jr. despite knowing full well he’s an anti-vaxxer, conspiracy theorist crank. You emboldened Trump to go even further with his insane and corrupt agenda when you voted Saturday to confirm Todd Blanche, his former lawyer, as attorney general. You own this mess.”
