Republican senator from North Carolina who grew up in a trailer park and worked for many years as a management consultant before entering politics, which gave him what he calls a "process guy" approach to legislating. He had a meteoric rise: after just two terms in the North Carolina General Assembly he became speaker, having engineered a Republican majority in 2010.
Tillis calls himself a "pro-life, pro-Second-Amendment, pro-limited-government conservative", but he has worked with Democrats on gun safety and on protecting same-sex and interracial marriages. His state party censured him in 2023 for such heresies.
He was one of three Republican senators to vote against the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in 2025, concluding that its cuts to Medicaid would be "devastating" to North Carolina. After Donald Trump threatened to drum up a primary challenger, Tillis announced he would not seek a third term. He says he has warned Republicans they are making the same mistake Democrats made under Barack Obama: "They get drunk with an election. They overreach."
Tillis has blocked the confirmation of Kevin Warsh as Federal Reserve chairman until the Department of Justice drops what Tillis calls a "bogus investigation" into the incumbent, Jerome Powell.
I didn't go to university. Didn't even finish A-levels. But I have sympathy for those who did