WASHINGTON — In a new memoir about his time as a U.S. senator, Thom Tillis portrays himself as willing to stand up to President Donald Trump for the good of the country and the Republican Party.

The North Carolina Republican insists he didn’t grow a spine only after announcing his retirement last year, writing that he “stood up to President Trump on many occasions” even in his first term.

It’s a self-portrait that Tillis has quickly shown to be an illusion.

Toward the end of the book, published last week after Tillis apparently finished writing it in May, Tillis promises to “lead the fight” against any future excesses of the Trump administration.

“If a nominee for attorney general is put forward who has, in any way, excused the events of January 6, 2021 — or who has played a role in setting up a fund to pay those people for the supposed suffering they endured — he (or she) is not going to get past me,” Tillis writes, describing his willingness to continue standing up to Trump until he leaves Congress in January.

At the time Tillis was writing, Todd Blanche, Trump’s former personal lawyer, had been serving as acting attorney general following the departure of Pam Bondi. Just weeks earlier, Blanche ordered the creation of a $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” slush fund to pay Jan. 6 rioters for their alleged suffering before Trump pardoned them upon taking office.

Then, in June, Trump nominated Blanche to be the full-fledged attorney general. It took a couple of months, but he got by Tillis, winning the senator’s crucial support in the Senate Judiciary Committee in August and then in a final confirmation vote on the Senate floor. Blanche agreed to shelve the slush fund, but nothing was done about an extraordinary deal permanently exempting Trump and his family from IRS investigation, and nothing was done to prevent Trump from paying the hundreds of convicted rioters who’ve sued for damages.

Regardless of what happened with the fund, Blanche is the man who initially set it up. So Tillis broke the promise he made in his book before the book even came out.

The senator’s support for Blanche is all the more striking considering the regrets he chronicles about his support for other Trump Cabinet officials, namely Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

“Voting to confirm Pete Hegseth is the biggest regret of my career,” Tillis writes of the culture war-obsessed former Fox News host, later adding that his vote for Kennedy, an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist, is “another of my regrets.”

So why’d he do it? By his own admission, Tillis voted for unqualified nominees out of personal cowardice. Before the Hegseth vote, three other Republicans had already indicated they’d oppose him, so a “nay” vote from Tillis would have killed the nomination. A similar situation happened with Kennedy’s nomination, which Tillis could have single-handedly blocked in a committee vote. He didn’t want to be the guy.

“I wasn’t going to be the lone voice in the wilderness keeping the president’s pick from getting across the finish line. I had no intention of letting my colleagues outsource their courage to me while they pretended to go along with the questionable nomination,” Tillis wrote, implying his colleagues didn’t want to vote the way they did.

Throughout the book, titled “How to Lose Friends and Antagonize Presidents: The Trouble With Sycophants, Courage Outsourcing, and Partisan Groupthink,” Tillis makes excuses for Trump, attributing the president’s bad decisions to advice from aides — continuing a habit from his interviews with reporters in Senate hallways.

“From the beginning of President Trump’s second term, I’ve made it clear that my beef is not with him, but the idiots he’s got working for him,” Tillis wrote. “While there are many good people currently employed in the West Wing, too many others are cynical, shameless, boot-licking sycophants who shouldn’t be allowed to tour the White House, let alone work there.”

Even Trump’s decision to issue a blanket pardon for the Jan. 6 rioters — something Trump repeatedly promised to do during the 2024 campaign — “was yet another idea whispered into his ear by some White House toady,” Tillis claims.

Trump’s Cabinet secretaries, Tillis wrote, routinely engaged in “embarrassing ass-kissing” of the president during televised meetings at the White House. Yet he himself calls the president “an amazing political talent” who “gets things done like no president I’ve ever seen.”

Tillis further excused Trump’s weaponization of the Justice Department and his disregard for constitutional limits on the power of the presidency by claiming former President Barack Obama had used “dictatorial” methods to make Congress pass the Affordable Care Act, even though the legislation moved through five different congressional committees in a transparent process that took more than a year.

“One administration later, the Biden administration picked up where Obama left off, overseeing not one, not two, but three separate federal investigations into President Trump,” Tillis writes.

The senator perhaps forgot his previous suggestion that Trump should be prosecuted. In explaining his February 2021 vote to acquit Trump of the impeachment charge of “incitement of insurrection” after Trump spurred a mob to attack the Capitol, Tillis said impeachment wasn’t the best way to hold a then-former elected official accountable.

“The ultimate accountability is through our criminal justice system where political passions are checked and due process is constitutionally mandated,” Tillis said in 2021. “No president is above the law or immune from criminal prosecution, and that includes former President Trump.”

Trump nudged Tillis into announcing his retirement last year by criticizing the senator’s vote against Trump’s signature tax law, which included health care spending cuts Tillis said would be devastating for North Carolina. That decision hasn’t worked out for the president: Democrats are now all but certain to win the seat Tillis once held, easily dispatching a Trump-endorsed challenger.

Tillis’ vote, notably, did not matter. The legislation passed anyway, so Tillis did not burden himself carrying courage for other senators.

Tillis stood up to Trump more effectively this year when he announced he would block any Federal Reserve nominees until the Justice Department dropped a sham investigation into Fed Chair Jerome Powell. Tillis claimed in his book that the criminal case “did not seem to have come from the Department of Justice at all” and instead had been the handiwork of a rogue prosecutor, namely U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro. Tillis released his hold after Pirro dropped the investigation in April.

Before he voted to confirm Blanche as attorney general, Tillis joined Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) — one of the Republicans who lost in a primary to a Trump-backed challenger — in complaining about the rioter slush fund, which resulted from the settlement of a lawsuit Trump filed against his own administration.

In response, Blanche issued a new order rescinding the previous one. Still, there’s nothing to stop the Trump administration from paying rioters, and the president got to keep a part of the settlement that granted his family immunity from any ongoing tax audits, potentially saving the president more than $100 million.

Ahead of the committee vote to advance Blanche’s nomination, Tillis acknowledged from the dais that the weaponization of government is “maybe a little bit more intense in this administration” than previous ones, but he claimed confirming Blanche would somehow “bend the curve of this absurdity.”

The curve does not appear to be bending. The Justice Department this week announced a dubious criminal investigation against Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), making her at least the 11th elected Democrat potentially facing charges under the Trump administration.

Tillis closes out his book saying he hopes Trump thinks of him as Cordelia, the truth-telling daughter from Shakespeare’s “King Lear,” who tells her father she loves him only as a daughter should, “no more nor less.” The king disowns Cordelia, goes insane, and most of the play’s main characters die.

“In one of my messages to the president last year in the hour I decided to retire, I told him if I prove nothing else during my remaining time in the Senate, I hope I prove to him that I care about his legacy and the legacy of the Republican party,” Tillis writes. “I also warned him he has people around him who don’t.”

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