Lara Trump would 'be a disaster for Republicans' — and a 'dream for Dems': Ex-GOP strategist

When the U.S. Senate voted, 51-49, to procedurally advance President Donald Trump's "big, beautiful bill," there were only two GOP holdouts: Kentucky's Rand Paul and North Carolina's Thom Tillis. Trump wasted no time calling for Tillis to be voted out of office in 2026 via a GOP primary, but Tillis decided to quit rather than risk getting fired: on Sunday, June 29, the conservative senator announced that he won't be seeking reelection.

Tillis' decision was followed by another political bombshell: NOTUS and The Hill reported that Lara Trump — President Donald Trump's daughter-in-law, Eric Trump's wife and former co-chair of the Republican National Committee (RNC) — is "seriously considering" running for the seat that Tillis will be vacating.

Early Monday afternoon, June 30, MSNBC's Chris Jansing discussed the news on Lara Trump with two veteran political insiders: former GOP strategist/consultant Stuart Stevens — a Never Trump conservative known for his extensive work with The Lincoln Project — and Democratic strategist Jim Messina, who served as deputy White House chief of staff under former President Barack Obama. And Stevens and Messina agreed that the Democratic nominee would have a good chance against Lara Trump if she runs for the U.S. Senate seat presently held by Tillis.

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Stevens told Jansing and Messina, "I think she'd be a disaster for Republicans. Well, two things are true. The race probably would be over — she would win the primary, and she'd probably be the worst candidate that they could field. This has been a very tightly contested state. It's one of the states that (Mitt) Romney won (in 2012) and that Obama had won before."

Stevens continued, "I don't think there's anything that's going on now inside the Trump World that he's delivering that makes him more popular in North Carolina."

The Never Trumper described Tillis as "sort of a tragic figure" in U.S. politics.

"I think he's a very decent man," Stevens told Jansing and Messina. "He has an interesting background, moved around all his life. Never went to the same high school two years in a row, has a real sense of humanity — and yet, he became a Trumper. It reminds me of the quote (Winston) Churchill said about (Neville) Chamberlain: you had a choice between dishonor and war — you chose dishonor, and you will have war. And there's just so many Republicans like him."

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Jansing implied that if former North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a two-term centrist Democrat, decides to enter North Carolina's 2026 U.S. Senate race, he would be a formidable opponent against Lara Trump.

Messina emphasized that North Carolina is very much a swing state — not a deep red state — and North Carolina Democrats would attack her an extremist.

Messina told Jansing and Stevens, "Boy, Chris, I have some bipartisan agreement with Stuart on this one. Like Lara Trump is a dream for Democrats, and she will lose that seat…. She will not be able to separate herself from Donald Trump and all the things he just did. You know, a normal candidate can come out there and say, 'Look, I disagree with the president on a couple of things. I'm a different kind of Republican' — the way Thom Tillis won two very, very close Senate races. He won by less than two points last time. This is a state that Trump only won by three points in the last election. It is the prototypical swing state, and Lara Trump will just own all the anger at what President Trump is doing to these voters."

On the Senate floor, Tillis forcefully laid out his reasons for opposing Trump's "big, beautiful bill." And Messina predicted that North Carolina voters will "see" clips of that speech "in a whole bunch of campaign ads."

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