The glorious spectacle of a Republican gone rogue

February 9, 2026

Ben Wiseman

If you missed the previous newsletter, you can read it here.

Thom Tillis vs. the Trump administration

	By Frank Bruni

What does it look and sound like when a Republican lawmaker who has mostly been a cheerleader for Team Trump trades his pompoms for a shiv?

Senator Thom Tillis is showing us. And it’s a glorious spectacle.

In a recent exchange with reporters in Washington, the North Carolina Republican didn’t merely say that Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, had made “amateurish” mistakes. He stressed that he couldn’t think of a single thing she’d done over the past year that she can be proud of.

His appraisal of another senior administration official was no gentler. “Stephen Miller never fails to live up to my expectations of incompetence,” Tillis said.

But the real beauty? The sign that Tillis was uncapping a deep well of disgust and reveling in the release? He composed an ornate, irate social media post of roughly 200 words in which he expounded on the meaning of “sycophant” and explained why the slur fit Miller and Noem so snugly.

“Common Synonyms: toady, flunky, bootlicker,” Tillis wrote. He invoked “The Lord of the Rings” movie trilogy to assert that Miller resembles Grima Wormtongue, who “uses his position to poison a leader’s standing for his own benefit.” Tillis added that Noem is a ringer for Dolores Umbridge in the Harry Potter movies, who “sucks up to authority to gain the power she needs to bully those ‘beneath’ her.”

There’s going rogue, and then there’s going rogue with a thesaurus in one hand and a movie glossary in the other. Tillis seems intent on making his complaints about the Trump administration’s errors and overreach as memorable as possible.

He also seems to be having a blast.

There he was on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Wednesday morning, mischief in his voice as he called the Justice Department’s investigation of Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve Board, “frivolous,” “vindictive” and “trumped-up.”

And there he was on Politico’s “The Conversation” the week before that, his eyes twinkling as he mused about the bafflingly low profile and dubious utility of Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence. “I don’t know if she’s in, like, the F.B.I. witness protection program,” he said.

He’s sassing. He’s smiling. The liberation of a conscience does wonders for a man.

Partial liberation, I should say. Even now, Tillis focuses most of his pique on the people around President Trump rather than the president himself, who’s the victim, in Tillis’s telling, of “bad advice.” And Tillis goes out of his way to cast his candor as faithful service to Trump and the Republican Party, which could suffer a serious setback in the midterm elections.

“I want this president to be the most successful Republican president in the history of this country,” he said on “The Conversation.” “His success is intrinsically linked to the success of Republicans this November.”

Tillis, 65, is no profile in unfettered courage. He’s in the final year of his second term and not running for re-election, so he needn’t worry about some ultra-MAGA hellion taking him on in a primary and getting Trump’s endorsement.

He also bears some responsibility for all the damage the Trump administration has done. He voted to confirm Noem, Gabbard, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Kash Patel and, most notoriously, Pete Hegseth, whose bid to become defense secretary Tillis reportedly tried to scuttle until Trump made the magnitude of his displeasure with that clear.

But over recent weeks, Tillis has reconnected with a past version of himself, the spirited maverick who found common cause with Democrats and emphasized common sense over strident partisanship. It’s a version that he never fully interred: After Trump pardoned rioters who invaded the U.S. Capitol and assaulted law enforcement officers on Jan. 6, 2021, Tillis gave an impassioned speech on the Senate floor protesting that decision.

But that spasm of rebellion was nothing like Tillis’s current tear. On “The Conversation,” he questioned the logic of many of the tariffs Trump imposed, harshly criticized the president’s huffing and puffing about Greenland, fretted over Trump’s estrangement of Canada and the European Union, and said that “anybody who thinks that NATO is passé and should go doesn’t understand the democratic world order.”

He also said that if the Justice Department is going to torment Powell for supposedly spending too lavishly on renovations of the Federal Reserve’s headquarters, “then I want to see the details of the East Wing cost, maybe even the cost of the Qatar jet, upfitting it to be a fake Air Force One.”

“I mean, we can go all over the place if we want to start talking about efficiency,” Tillis added.

Dasha Burns, the host of “The Conversation,” noted that Trump had called Tillis and Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, “losers” for having denigrated Noem. Burns asked Tillis for his response.

He shrugged off the insult, saying it was the stuff of “junior high school,” and likened it to “arm farts.”

I’ve heard some political observers speculate that Tillis is selfishly looking ahead to a post-Trump era when Republicans who raised alarms about the president’s policies and conduct will be rewarded for that or at least judged more kindly by history. Maybe so.

But Tillis will certainly have to weather ample ugliness from the MAGA faithful in the meantime. Just ask Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger. So I choose to compliment him. To thank him. And to hope that his example encourages some of the toadies, flunkies and bootlickers in the halls of Congress to rethink their sycophancy.

Forward this newsletter to friends …

… and they can sign up for themselves here. It’s published every Monday.

What I’m Watching, Listening To, Reading and Writing

A young Catherine O’Hara, wearing a yellow shirt and black jacket, in the movie “After Hours.”

Catherine O’Hara in “After Hours.” The Geffen Company

Many remembrances of Catherine O’Hara, the superb comic actress who died a little over a week ago, focused on her Emmy-winning work in “Schitt’s Creek” and her contributions to all those delicious Christopher Guest mockumentaries (“Waiting for Guffman,” “Best in Show” and more). I want to put in a plug for an earlier, smaller role of hers, the one that first put her on my radar. In the underrated Martin Scorsese oddity “After Hours,” released in 1985, she plays the driver of a Mr. Softee truck, and she turns a smattering of lines into a smorgasbord of eccentricity. “After Hours,” about a man (Griffin Dunne) navigating the wilds of downtown Manhattan in an effort to get back uptown, brims with terrific actors in bit parts: Teri Garr, John Heard, Linda Fiorentino. But it’s O’Hara who stays with you. Back then and over the decades that followed, she hit exquisitely tuned notes of kookiness that gave her a resonance all her own.
About two weeks ago, my friend Russell Lacy, who runs a small music school in Durham, N.C., recommended the indie band Racing Mount Pleasant, whose drummer, Casey Cheatham, was a longtime student of his. I’ve been listening to them contentedly since. R.M.P.’s music is hard to classify; I’ve seen the phrases “post-rock” and “baroque pop” applied to it, and it reminds me of the early output of San Fermin, described as “chamber pop.” “Chamber,” “baroque” — those are clues that strings and horns come into play, producing a sonic lushness in songs that go from intimate to grand and back again, on journeys rich with orchestral swells and jazzy fillips. This New Yorker appraisal of R.M.P.’s self-titled album “Racing Mount Pleasant,” released in August, captures it well. I wish the singing on the album were stronger, and a few tracks droop. But “Tenspeed (Shallows)” and “Call It Easy” exemplify the band at their best. As for San Fermin, hear them at their most fanciful in “Bar” and “Sonsick” and at their catchiest in “Emily” and “Cairo.”
In Time magazine recently, Judy Berman took insightful inventory of the domestic thrillers — books, movies, television series — that have proven so titanically popular over the past decade, and she presented some keen theories about their appeal. Her mention of “All Her Fault,” a recent eight-part series on Peacock based on a novel by Andrea Mara, reminded me to fess up to having binged it. Sophie Gilbert, who does reliably excellent cultural criticism for The Atlantic, explained the highs and lows of the show’s mash of melodrama and social commentary.
My Times Opinion colleague Bret Stephens and I have continued The Conversation; we recently discussed Trump’s trip to Davos in this installment and his threats to bomb Iran and desire to control the midterms in this one.

For the Love of Sentences

An illustration from “Moby-Dick.” with the whale tipping over a boat.

Bettmann/Getty Images

Last week’s newsletter “went to bed,” as we sometimes say in the business, before anyone could take in the full bounty of “Melania” reviews. So I add the following snippets to those that we previously savored:

In USA Today, Rex Huppke described the movie as “an unrequested documentary about first lady Melania Trump that was produced by first lady Melania Trump and stars first lady Melania Trump. Did I mention it’s called ‘Melania’? A better title might have been ‘A Turducken of Narcissism,’ but that’s splitting hairs.” (Thanks to Bill Williamson of Louisville, Ky., and Barry Stein of Narragansett. R.I., for nominating this.)

In The New Yorker, Lauren Collins focused on scenes in which the first lady plots a big dinner for MAGA moneymen: “Melania asserts that the theme is ‘white and gold.’ To her credit, that’s a fairly apt encapsulation of the entire Trumpist project.” (Darrell Ing, Honolulu)

In The Atlantic, Sophie Gilbert experienced the movie as a costume drama: “Melania shows off her custom-made inauguration gown, stark white with black ribbons overlaying it, a dress that now looks unavoidably like the redacted Epstein files.” (Pamela Finkelman, Wilmington, Del., and Simeon Stolzberg, Adams, Mass., among many others)

And in The Washington Post, Monica Hesse recognized the risk of appraising “Melania” for the newspaper owned — and recently gutted — by Jeff Bezos: “Every single review I’ve read has been terrible, but babe, if you suspect I have come here today to trash a movie about the wife of a notoriously thin-skinned, anti-journalist president that was bankrolled by the company founded by the man who also pays my salary — NOT TODAY, SATAN. Do you think I’m a moron?” She trashed it anyway. (Peggy Sweeney, Oviedo, Spain)

In his newsletter, Through the Fog, Elliot Kirschner responded to that gutting: “In 2017, The Post adopted the motto ‘Democracy dies in darkness.’ Now Bezos is the one with his hand on the light switch.” (Alan Stamm, Birmingham, Mich.)

In The New York Review of Books, Fintan O’Toole examined the first lady’s husband and remarked that “Night of Camp David,” a 1965 novel by Fletcher Knebel about an American president obsessed with “imperial expansion, racial purification, resource extraction and disdain for the old European democracies no longer reads like satirical hyperbole,” adding, “What was once delirium is now the daily news.” (David Chioni Moore, Saint Paul, Minn.)

In The Atlantic, Adam Serwer processed new information about the federal agents involved in Alex Pretti’s death: “Suffice it to say that two Hispanic Americans killing a white person trying to prevent them from harassing or deporting other Hispanic people, on the orders of Stephen Miller — a Jewish American whose ancestors fled pogroms in Eastern Europe — is a uniquely grotesque expression of the American melting pot in action.” (John Snyder, Hilton Head, S.C., and Dan Leemon, Atherton, Calif., among others)

Also in The Atlantic, James Parker took in a 25-hour, tag-team marathon in which each of hundreds of fans of “Moby-Dick” read aloud five minutes of Herman Melville’s classic novel in the New Bedford Whaling Museum in Massachusetts. “With ‘Moby-Dick’ itself, I may have my little fancy-pants peeves,” he wrote, “but let’s face it: Ahab is Donald Trump, and Ahab is me, and I am you, and Ted Nugent is the Pequod, and the whale is the whale, and the voyage is America. These resonances ring out; they ring out from New Bedford and keep going, traveling west until they roll down the hills of California and sink hissing into the sea.” (Amy Parish, San Diego)

In The Boston Globe, Kevin Paul Dupont beheld the rare spectacle of two gear-entombed, bottom-heavy hockey goalies getting into a fight and “spinning around out there, two oversized teapots in a tempest.” (Carl Cummings, Canton, Mass.)

In The Times, Dodai Stewart wondered if New York City would ever melt: “At this point, the leftover snow is hanging around like a guest who has not only stayed way too long at the party but is currently resting with dirty boots up on the furniture, smoking cigarettes and spilling wine on the rug.” (David Marshall, Carlton, Ore., and Robin Fogel-Shrive, Sacramento, among others)

In his newsletter, Experimental History, Adam Mastroianni made the case for good old-fashioned prose: “Thoughts that can survive being written into words are on average truer than thoughts that never leave the mind. You know how you can find a leak in a tire by squirting dish soap on it and then looking for where the bubbles form? Writing is like squirting dish soap on an idea: it makes the holes obvious.” (John Braunstein, Lancaster, Pa.)

And in The Globe and Mail of Toronto, Mona Leano-Arindaeng resisted any tidy verdict on how she’s adjusting to retirement: “Am I lost, depressed or quietly content? Do I need to name what I feel or can I simply flow through these shifting states of emptiness and ease, confusion and calm, and call it life?” (Peter Schmolka, Ottawa)

To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here and include your name and place of residence.