Tom Tillis said on October 4, 2026, that without checks on power, the United States could end up with “a sort of dictator king if we're not careful.” The 66-year-old senior senator from North Carolina said Congress should act as a co-equal branch, even as he prepares to leave the Senate.
He said the warning fits a broader pattern he sees across four administrations, with presidents eager to govern by executive order and lawmakers too willing to surrender authority. Tillis said that if Congress does not push back, the balance among the three branches will keep shifting toward the White House.
Tillis and Trump in June 2025
The comments follow Tillis’s decision in June 2025 to oppose Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Tillis said the measure would push too many low-income North Carolinians off Medicaid, and Trump called him “a talker and complainer, not a doer.” Trump also threatened to back a primary challenger, and Tillis said that helped drive his decision to retire instead of fight for his seat.
Tillis was first elected to the Senate in the 2014 midterm elections. He said he is “pro-Second Amendment, pro-life, limited government, fiscal restraint,” and described his book, How to Lose Friends and Antagonize Presidents, as part of the same fight over how much power Congress gives away.
Congress and the White House
Tillis said Congress should not hand more power to the White House simply because the president is from the same party. He said, “We always make the mistake when our guy's in office of conveying power to the White House,” and added, “I would say the same thing for Democratic-controlled Senate under Biden and Obama.”
He also said, “I want checks and balances. I want all three branches to have their individual role and continue to check power as they have for 250 years.” In the same remarks, he described many of the advisers Trump surrounded himself with as “sycophants.”
Pete Hegseth vote
The tension in Tillis’s criticism is that he said he voted to confirm all of Trump’s Cabinet nominees, including Pete Hegseth, and later called that vote his “biggest regret.” He recently called for Trump to fire Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, putting his own record and his current warning in the same frame.
That leaves Tillis with one clear message as he exits the Senate: the argument is no longer only about one president or one bill, but about whether Congress will still act as a check when the next dispute reaches the White House.
