How to Lose Friends and Antagonize Presidents: The Trouble with Sycophants, Courage Outsourcing, and Partisan Groupthink

Outspoken and uncensored, North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis pulls no punches about his time in Washington and how the sycophants surrounding President Trump, spineless Republican yes-men (and -women), and the weirdos of the MAGA world can’t get out of their own way.

How to Lose Friends and Antagonize Presidents is a bare-knuckled, darkly funny wake-up call from Senator Thom Tillis, a true conservative who doesn’t mind a good scrap in a Congress that has lost its nerve. In this sharp, no-BS book, Tillis drags readers inside a Senate that too often behaves like a group of teenagers in a bad parody of a horror movie—heading straight toward the chainsaws instead of a nearby getaway car. Tillis takes us into a world of grifting sycophants and useful idiots in Trump 2.0, with the inner circle made up of “MAGATS” (a term of his own devising). Fear, outsourced courage, and groupthink are hollowing out the party that Tillis spent much of his adult life building, and he’s not going to let it get dragged down without a fight. Drawing on his journey from trailer parks to the halls of power, Tillis offers a bracing tonic to stiffen spines, rebuild institutions, and keep the American experiment from going off the rails.