UNBELIEVABLE: RINO Senator Thom Tillis Runs to 60 Minutes to Claim MAGA Candidates Can’t Win General Elections

 

Sen. Thom Tillis appears on CBS’s 60 Minutes

Outgoing Republican Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC), who wisely decided not to seek re-election because he faced a guaranteed, historic primary blowout loss in North Carolina, took his anti-MAGA lecture from the ladies of “The View” straight to CBS’s “60 Minutes” and declared that a MAGA Republican cannot win a general election.

Reality has a different scoreboard. President Donald Trump won the popular vote in 2024 with 77.3 million votes, carried all seven swing states, and took 312 electoral votes.

The retiring North Carolina senator sat down with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat on CBS’s 60 Minutes and delivered the establishment’s favorite sermon: MAGA cannot win a national election. 

According to 60 Minutes, Tillis told Douthat that after a tough 2026, the party will face a fight over 2028, and that President Trump’s preferred profile is the wrong one.

Ross Douthat:
After a tough 2026, it’ll be 2028. It’ll be a presidential cycle. What does the battle over the future of your party look like then?

Thom Tillis:
You know, we’re going to have this situation where the president’s going to have a heavy influence on the primary. And, boy, this is when we really have to speak frankly about what kind of profile we need to win a national election in 2028. And it probably isn’t what the president is thinking right now as a go-to pick.

So we’re going to have to have a serious discussion with that. The RNC, other Republican organizations, need to come down and take the president’s advice, but look more towards the Republican Party priorities and things that go beyond 2028.

Ross Douthat:
What would be wrong with the president’s go-to pick?

Thom Tillis:
Because I think it’s one that works well in red MAGA states, won’t work well for a general election.

Ross Douthat:
Are we talking about the Vice President or are we talking hypothetically?

Thom Tillis:
Well, I don’t know. I assume right now, you know, I guess the Texas Trumpapalooza, whatever it was called, [Vance] was kind of introduced and, I think, endorsed by Turning Point. So it looks like things would lead that way. 

It’s not necessarily a lock in terms of the president’s endorsement, but I don’t think the president should handpick. The president is, by definition, going to be in retirement when the next person is sworn into office. The president should have a say, but this is not a decision that should be solely his.

WATCH:

Tillis’s argument about the electoral reach of a Trump-aligned candidate comes against the backdrop of Trump’s own 2024 victory.

According to the Federal Election Commission’s official results, Trump received 77,302,580 votes nationwide in 2024 and defeated Kamala Harris in the national popular vote. Trump ultimately secured 312 electoral votes to Harris’s 226.

Trump also carried the seven states broadly treated as the principal 2024 presidential battlegrounds: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Those states had been identified before Election Day as the seven central battlegrounds determining the presidential contest.

CBS aired its Tillis interview on October 4 as the North Carolina senator promotes his new book, How to Lose Friends and Antagonize Presidents.

  Tillis appeared on ABC’s “The View,” where the panel discussed Trump publicly posting Senator Tom Cotton’s phone number.

“With all due respect, I got his number too,” Tillis responded.

The appearance was part of Tillis’s media push surrounding his memoir, which details his deteriorating relationship with Trump and members of the administration.

 Tillis supplied reporters with screenshots of profanity-laced messages he says he sent Trump, including one in which he wrote that he would have told Trump to “f*** yourself” if Trump had directly threatened him with a primary challenge.