WASHINGTON — Thom Tillis has always said that he hates the camera. Then he announced his retirement last year.

Now, the moderate Republican from North Carolina cannot stop making headlines.

In a fiery floor speech earlier this year, Tillis said he was leaving the Senate to remove himself from any “boundaries I should have in expressing my concern and creating complications for my campaign” and Senate Republicans maintaining the majority.

His retirement, which he announced last June, allows him to “speak truth” to President Donald Trump about White House policies and advice from Trump’s staff, he said earlier this month. But, the two-term senator also lamented that he was “sick of stupid” coming from the Oval Office.

That stream of honesty has turned into a firehose aimed towards Trump’s White House, leading to an increasingly personal back-and-forth between Tillis and the president during a time when Trump will certainly need his vote.

It came to a head earlier this week when Trump referred to Tillis as a “loser” during an interview with ABC News, to which the senator replied, “Apparently that qualifies me for DHS secretary and senior adviser to the president!”

Online, people have referred to the North Carolina senator as “Tillis unleashed.”

In some ways, he is feeling unleashed: “I think what it comes down to is, obviously, I don’t have to look through a political lens anymore,” he said Thursday.

“But if people look back over the course of the 20 years I’ve been in legislative politics, I have always bucked,” Tillis continued. “I’ve bucked the first (Trump) administration on certain things, but now clearly I can be more vocal.”

Tillis announced his retirement last year in part because of his opposition to the chamber’s sweeping budget reconciliation bill. That period kickstarted the more frequent criticisms lobbed between Trump and Tillis, which will likely continue as Tillis finishes out his last year in the Senate.

The Republican says he maintains a “transactional relationship” with Trump. But he still seems to be counting the days until he heads for the doors — 339, he said in a Thursday interview.

“I’m going to disagree when I disagree but, outside of the loser comment, which I actually had a lot of fun with, we don’t really have bad words,” Tillis said. “You will see over the next 339 days that I support the vast majority of what the president wants. There’s only a couple of instances where what he’s trying to accomplish I disagree with.”

“I just texted the president and said, ‘Great job,’” Tillis said Thursday of the administration’s sending of White House Border Czar Tom Homan to Minnesota following rising tensions between protesters and Border Patrol agents.

Tillis has criticized the administration’s handling of the fatal shooting of U.S. citizen Alex Pretti by agents over the weekend, specifically calling on Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to resign.

He has refrained from directly criticizing the president himself, instead coalescing his frustration around Trump’s advisers and the “bad advice” he says Trump is getting from them. His frustration has reached several bubbling points the first few weeks of 2026 alone over statements and decisions made regarding U.S. efforts to obtain Greenland, the Federal Reserve, and most recently, the incidents in Minnesota.

But Tillis’ criticism of DHS and Noem extends beyond Minneapolis to her handling of the Federal Emergency Management Agency; he ramped up his calls for her removal from the Senate floor on Thursday.

“It’s not a secret that I have problems with the secretary of Homeland Security and the way that her failed leadership has led to unconscionable results in Minneapolis,” he said. “Another part of the secretary of Homeland Security’s job is disaster response, and I cannot tell you enough how incompetent, based on the facts, that she is on that score.”

“No reasonable business person would accept this in the C-suite. She needs to get out of the C-suite.”

North Carolina is still recovering from Hurricane Helene, which ravaged the western part of Tillis’s state in 2024.

‘Terrible’ senator, Trump says

The tension is creating a growing headache for Senate GOP leadership, especially as Tillis joins a handful of other Senate Republicans, like Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, who are more vocal in their opposition to the Trump administration.

While Tillis typically votes with his party, he sometimes joins into bipartisan efforts to find common ground on divisive issues, including on immigration and gun violence. He also backed legislation in 2022 to codify federal recognition of same-sex marriage.

“They’re terrible senators. One is gone, and the other should be gone,” Trump also said Wednesday of Tillis, as well as Murkowski, who is not up for reelection until 2029.

Leadership now has to thread a needle between Tillis’s votes and Trump’s wishes. That strain will soon be put to the test: Tillis could be the deciding vote on how confirming the next chair for the Federal Reserve will go, and how easy or difficult the process will be.

During a Cabinet meeting Thursday, Trump said he will be “announcing, next week, sometime” his pick for the role.

A swing vote on the Banking Committee, Tillis has maintained that he will oppose the confirmation of any Federal Reserve nominee until the Justice Department’s investigation of Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell is resolved. The committee is split 13-11.

“The Fed Noms are not going to change until the investigation or potential indictment of chair Powell is completed. So the DOJ has got to decide when to lift those holds. It gets lifted the day that case is adjudicated or withdrawn,” he said. “That’s their choice.”

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Daniela Altimari and Andrew Menezes contributed to this report.

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