Give Senator Tillis credit for finally saying and doing the right things

At the outset of the American Civil War, a young and at the time relatively undistinguished U.S. Army officer from Illinois who would later rise swiftly through the ranks, offered a simple and straightforward assessment of the political situation in his divided and troubled country in a letter to his father.

“There are but two parties now, traitors and patriots,” said Ulysses S. Grant, “and I want hereafter to be ranked with the latter, and I trust, the stronger party.”

Grant’s trenchant and ultimately famous observation has surfaced frequently in the national political conversation in the present era as those opposed to Donald Trump’s blitzkrieg against democracy and the Constitution have grasped for ways to characterize and rally the resistance.

Some observers, of course, rightfully point out that while the current situation is deeply worrisome, it remains a far cry from the reality Grant was watching play out in April of 1861. The United States of 2026 may be a hot mess right now, but there is little indication that we are on the precipice of mass violence – much less a civil war that would take the lives of 2% of the nation’s population.

That said, it’s also undeniable that there is a painful and powerful truth in Grant’s statement that resonates today as forces led by a rogue president work aggressively to discard decades of established constitutional precedent and societal progress and establish what amounts to a lawless and violent autocracy.

And right now, thankfully, North Carolinians are watching as this development plays out in the strong and even courageous statements and actions of their senior U.S. senator, Thom Tillis.

The most recent example: Tillis’s powerful and the on-the-mark takedowns of Trump’s outrageous and un-American immigration enforcement regime. As veteran political observer Thomas Mills observed in an insightful column last week, when it comes to the disaster playing out in the Department of Homeland Security and the crisis it has precipitated in Minnesota, “Tillis is leading that charge. He’s put himself out there despite a vindictive White House and he’s making clear that other Republicans are with him, even if they are too cowardly to speak up. His politics are right on this issue.”

Mills notes further that these actions come on the heels of Tillis’s previous breaks with Trump on several other definitive issues – including Putin’s war on Ukraine, Greenland, pardoning of January 6 insurrectionists and the use of the Department of Justice against Federal Reserve chief Jerome Powell.

That it has come to this is something that would have seemed unlikely even a few years ago. Though Tillis has never really been a true Trump loyalist, he also caved into the demands of Trump and his minions for years and, in many instances, has happily championed much of the far right’s policy agenda.

And even today, as Tillis prepares to enter forced retirement in 11 months thanks to the demands of the Trumpist far right, it would be delusional to think that he has somehow been transformed into a fighting progressive. That he is still the same man who once infamously called upon conservatives to “divide and conquer” the Americans receiving public assistance by encouraging people with physical disabilities to “look down” on those without them seems likely.

But of course, it would be equally delusional to imagine that such incongruities weren’t fully present at the time of Grant’s statement and throughout the Civil War era.

As even a cursory review of history reminds us, the Americans and their leaders who remained loyal to the Union were a hugely diverse lot – a group that included not just dedicated abolitionists and human rights supporters, but an ample supply of white supremacists, capitalists on the make, cynical and ambitious politicians, and scoundrels of all kinds.

At some basic level, however, what united these people and bestows upon them all, in retrospect, a measure of nobility and heroism was their commitment – as Grant neatly summed it up – to side with preserving and extending the American experiment in human freedom.

They may have disagreed, even vehemently, on scores of hugely important issues, but at some basic and core level, they came together, often messily and inefficiently, on what was a fundamental matter of right and wrong. And their successful effort to resist the establishment of a new nation premised on the evil of slavery remains one of the great and seminal achievements of modern human history.

And so it is that today, at what amounts to another getting-down-to-brass-tacks moment in our nation’s history, North Carolinians are right to give Senator Tillis credit, thanks and support for finally saying and doing the right things.

Caring and thinking people can and will rightfully disagree with the senator on numerous important matters, but there will always be time for those debates. Right now, when it comes to the issue that dwarfs all others – Donald Trump’s ongoing effort to rend American democracy and impose authoritarianism – Tillis is siding with the patriots.