Thom Tillis understood how to tell the truth in the cult of Trump’s GOP: stop

Thom Tillis, the former president of the Northern Carolina House of Representatives who since 2015 has been a modestly responsible republican in the American Senate, has faced a challenge. Trump’s White House increased pressure on congress to adopt the dangerous program contained in what the president nicknamed the “major bill”. (The bill was approved Tuesday by the Senate after Vice-President JD Vance obtained an equal vote of 50-50.) Tillis knew that the MEDICAIDS Cups of the bill “would lead to tens of billions of dollars in funding lost for North Carolina, including our hospitals and our rural communities”. But he also knew what to say out loud and challenge Trump could trigger a toxic magazine.

Tillis had two options. He could either lie and stay on the right side of Trump.

Or he could tell the truth and engage Trump’s anger.

Tillis chose the truth, and it was the end of him. In a republican party where dissent is no longer tolerated, the North Carolinian has ended his political career.

Tillis is not an unlimited electoral dilettante. He has been a political agent for decades. And there remains one of the most wise and experienced Republicans in the Senate. As such, its story tells us everything we need to know about the evolution of the great old party in a little more than a rubber stamp for Trump and Trumpism.

Tillis did not just make the moral and practical argument to rework the “great beautiful bill” to protect Medicaid. He tried to warn the colleagues senators republican of the dangers posed by the bill as he is currently written, using a presentation in behind during a republican lunch last week to detail how the Medicaid cuts should devastate red states and, which could suggest that the support of the GOP for these cuts “could cost American majorities in the two houses”.

It was a precise representation of the human and political costs of the bill. But when he asked Republican colleagues to choose the well-being of their own voters, and political reality, during the trip to Trump’s ego, Tillis practically found any lessee.

Without a team of Republicans who were ready to get up and negotiate with Trump for a better bill, Tillis found himself isolated. And the president found a target for his political revenge. “Many people have come forward by wanting to run in primary off against the” senator “Thom Tillis”, Trump announced on social networks. “I will meet them in the coming weeks, looking for someone who will correctly represent the great people of North Carolina and, so important, the United States of America.”

North Carolina is a swing state that has developed a democratic voting model in the recent state competitions for the governor, the Attorney General and other positions. But its republican party base is even more extreme than Trump, and the primary voters of the GOP of the State recently supported some of the candidates the extreme right of the country. Tillis took this threat seriously. He knew that he was unlikely to survive a main challenge supported by Trump, so he decided to jump before the inevitable push.

A few hours after Trump’s main threat, Tillis, who had already expressed his frustration in the face of the chaotic nature of Trump’s second term, said that he would not seek a third term. “In Washington in recent years, it has become more and more obvious that leaders who are ready to adopt bipartite, compromise and demonstrate an independent thought become an endangered species,” said Tillis on Sunday, adding that he was not interested in spending “additional six years in political theater and supporter in Washington”.

It is a delicate way of saying that it was not ready to bow before a republican president who governs the party as a cult of personality.