Dirtbag Thom and his stupid book NO ONE asked for (or even wants)
This is not a joke. This is a real book to be released around October. Harper Collins, a real big-time publisher, actually put up money to publish this stinker.
Here’s the publisher’s sales pitch:
Outspoken and uncensored, North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis pulls no punches about his time in Washington and how the sycophants surrounding President Trump, spineless Republican yes-men (and -women), and the weirdos of the MAGA world can’t get out of their own way.
How to Lose Friends and Antagonize Presidents is a bare-knuckled, darkly funny wake-up call from Senator Thom Tillis, a true conservative who doesn’t mind a good scrap in a Congress that has lost its nerve.
In this sharp, no-BS book, Tillis drags readers inside a Senate that too often behaves like a group of teenagers in a bad parody of a horror movie—heading straight toward the chainsaws instead of a nearby getaway car.
Tillis takes us into a world of grifting sycophants and useful idiots in Trump 2.0, with the inner circle made up of “MAGATS” (a term of his own devising). Fear, outsourced courage, and groupthink are hollowing out the party that Tillis spent much of his adult life building, and he’s not going to let it get dragged down without a fight. Drawing on his journey from trailer parks to the halls of power, Tillis offers a bracing tonic to stiffen spines, rebuild institutions, and keep the American experiment from going off the rails.
The only way the publisher gets their money back on this is if these books get peddled Jim Wright-style.
NONE OF THIS is what Tillis got elected to do.
He struggled to get past weak candidates in both of his races. In 2014, he got 48 percent against super-weak Kay Hagan and a Libertarian pizza guy. In 2020, with Trump’s endorsement, he once again scored 48 percent and slid past his scandal-ridden pal Cal Cunningham and a crowd of minor party candidates. (In 2021, we learned Tillis would have lost if news of Cunningham’s marital affair had not leaked.)
The only reason he’s not running this year is the RNC showed him polls that had him losing to Cooper as bad as Whatley is right now.
And he had the nerve to publicly offer Whatley campaign advice.
So, he’s coming out with a book trashing the president who saved him from certain defeat – at the hands of a wealthy primary challenger AND Democrat Cal Cunningham. Thom’s getting a lot of drive-by attention for beating on Trump, as well.
It seems like a bizarre strategy to position yourself as a foe of a president your state voted for three times. It’s also pretty low-life to mock your constituents as ‘MAGATs’. He sounds like some of the Roy Cooper groupies out there.
What he’s doing is not representing. He’s stroking his own, um, ego right in front of us and laughing his ass off the whole time. He knows we can’t hold him accountable. He’s not running again.
Celebrating Tillis as some kind of principled statesman is a joke. He once told an interviewer he got into politics because he wanted the town to build a bike trail. Richard Morgan and Paul Shumaker recruited him to primary and take out then-representative John Rhodes, an actual principled conservative statesman.
In his early years in the House, he teamed with Democrats to pass the alternative energy mandates that make each of our power bills so damn high. When the GOP took over in Raleigh, Charlotte money men got him installed as speaker. At that point, Thom and his cronies went to work weeding out conservatives on Jones Street and replacing them with his kind of people.
His time as speaker was marked by rewards for people who shelled out big bucks. I won’t forget the stories of his marathon votes on UNC board seats. Devotion to reforming UNC didn’t matter. It was all about the size of checks the board candidates wrote. Thom wasn’t shy about telling that. He kept those votes open until every one of his top donors got seated on the boards.
He served as speaker throughout the 2014 Senate campaign. He’d make speeches favoring an issue while out on the campaign trail. Someone with that particular interest would write him a check, and the next thing you know — Thom’s gang in Raleigh was pushing through legislation just like what Tillis had praised on the campaign trail. We ALL paid to send him to Washington in 2014.
I just saw a clip online where Tillis claimed he did not know Chuck Edwards. Yet, he admits to organizing the Edwards primary challenge to Madison Cawthorn. We also learned that $700K from a scandal-ridden, now-collapsed bitcoin exchange ended up in a PAC tied to Tillis and his gang.
In DC, he openly embraced anti-border wall measures, gay marriage, and amnesty for illegals. Never mind the people back home he supposedly *represents* wanted none of that.
We told ourselves “He’s better than Hagan /Cunningham” and prayed things would get better. But they didn’t. And we, as a state and as Republicans, suffered for it.
CNN loooooooves him now. Though, he’s arguably the most despised person in North Carolina. He’s making himself a star by trashing Trump. But, by doing that, he’s helping to kill the electoral chances of Michael Whatley — whose initial rise to power was totally due to Tillis.
Since his *retirement* announcement, Tillis has done little else but flip off everyone who helped him get where he is now. Expect even more middle fingers from him now through January.
