The last remnants of the old Republican resistance are being swept away.
Perhaps that is too dramatic an assessment of North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis’ decision not to seek a third term next year. After all, the 64-year-old Republican has hardly been a paragon for internal resistance to President Donald Trump.
Tillis voted against convicting Trump in both of his impeachment trials. He voted to confirm all 21 of Trump’s second-term Cabinet nominees, including (thanks to a targeted pressure campaign from Trump allies) a last-minute reversal to support Pete Hegseth for defense secretary. And during the first term, Tillis made a big stink about opposing Trump’s declaration of a national emergency in 2019 to reappropriate money for a border wall that Congress refused to fund—only to reverse himself three weeks later and vote against a resolution disapproving of the president’s declaration.
And on Saturday, when Tillis voted against proceeding on Trump’s signature domestic policy legislation, the “Big Beautiful Bill,” it looked as if it was only the beginning of a drawn-out exercise in performative opposition with Tillis doing what nearly every Republican with ambition ends up doing in such cases: bending the knee to MAGA. That might have been what Trump expected when he posted on Truth Social Saturday night that he would be meeting with all Republicans seeking to primary Tillis next year. Fear will keep Republican lawmakers in line.
What few counted on was that Tillis was preparing to walk away from it all. His Sunday statement characterized the choice to run for reelection as “between spending another six years navigating the political theatre and partisan gridlock in Washington or spending that time with the love of my life Susan, our two children, three beautiful grandchildren, and the rest of our extended family back home.” A few hours later, Tillis was on the floor of the Senate, blasting the Big Beautiful Bill’s proposed cuts to Medicaid and providing a trove of clips for Democratic congressional campaigns to use against Republicans next year.
As Bob Dylan sang, when you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.
Tillis still has 18 months left in his term, so we’ll see what sort of fight he is willing to put up in the areas where he disagrees with the Trump administration. Ukraine? An expansion of executive power? Appointments to the Justice Department or the federal bench? Liberating himself from the ugly realities of electoral politics may make Tillis more comfortable to “call the balls and strikes as I see fit,” as he said in his statement.
But what Tillis’ planned exit clarifies is how little umpiring goes on these days within the GOP. When Trump first became president in 2017, the U.S. Senate was full of, well, Republican mavericks, most of whom have either died or left office. Their dwindling numbers in what is designed to be the most slow-moving, deliberative institution of the federal government are making way for a Republican Senate that looks much more like the pliant, cheerleading Republican House of Representatives. (Indeed, one of the more independent Republican House members, Don Bacon, also announced his retirement this week.)
There was Trump’s chief Capitol Hill nemesis of the first term, Arizona Sen. John McCain, whose final big decision before his death in 2018 was to kill a bill to replace the Affordable Care Act, denying Trump a significant domestic policy victory. His fellow Arizonan, Sen. Jeff Flake, called it quits after one term, announcing his own decision not to run for reelection with a pointed 2017 speech on the Senate floor decrying the increasingly “coarse” tone of American politics led by the example of Trump. Flake’s retirement came one month after another Republican senator and occasional Trump critic, Bob Corker of Tennessee, announced he would not run for reelection. Corker would subsequently speak out about Trump’s behavior, calling the president “reckless” on the world stage.
Then consider that most of the seven Republican senators who, in 2021, voted to convict Trump following the January 6 riot at the Capitol are no longer in the Senate. Two, Richard Burr of North Carolina and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, had already announced they would not seek reelection in 2022. Two more soon followed: Ben Sasse of Nebraska resigned in 2023 to serve as president of the University of Florida, and Mitt Romney of Utah declined to run for reelection in 2024.
Among the remainders is Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who may still run for reelection in 2026 but is already hearing rumblings of a Trump-backed primary challenge. Then there’s Sen. Lisa Murkowski, the moderate from Alaska who had previously won reelection as write-in candidate and, thanks to her state’s new ranked-choice voting rules, was able to prevail over a pro-Trump Republican challenger in 2022. Sen. Susan Collins, who is planning to run for reelection next year, may be the only Republican who can win a statewide federal race in her state of Maine, which makes her an undesirable target for Team Trump to get revenge. Except for voting against Hegseth’s nomination to run the Pentagon, neither Murkowski nor Collins has cast many votes against the Trump agenda in his second term. Cassidy, meanwhile, voted for all of Trump’s Cabinet appointees, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for health and human services secretary–despite Cassidy’s stated concerns about Kennedy’s hostility to vaccines.
Then there’s the Old Crow, Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who since relinquishing his role as leader has become a tough critic and relatively frequent vote against Trump’s interests in the Senate. McConnell, like Tillis, will be retiring at the end of his term in January 2027.
So who is left to challenge Trump, either from the center or the right, from the hawkish wing or the dovish one, from the side of more decent politics, or, at the very least, less chaos? You have to squint to see them.
Sen. Rand Paul, like fellow libertarian-minded Kentuckian Rep. Thomas Massie, seems poised to put his money where his mouth is on government spending, signalling that he will oppose the Big Beautiful Bill. (That’s unlike Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who, after criticizing the bill for its spending levels, appears to be looking for an excuse to support the final bill.) Sen. Ted Cruz has broken with Trump on trade. Utah’s John Curtis, who succeeded Romney in the Senate, voted against some of Trump’s spending priorities while in the House and has spoken out against tariffs. And on Ukraine, Indiana Sen. Todd Young has been one of the leaders in the Republican conference trying to push the administration to be tougher on Russia.
The GOP’s pushback on Trump within the Senate is muted, targeted, and rhetorically aimed at gently guiding the president rather than checking his worst impulses. Republican voters are with Trump (89 percent, according to Gallup). The Republican House is totally in lockstep with the White House. So is Republican Senate leadership.
In other words, the anti-Trump Republicans are extinct. Their fire has gone out of Washington.