What the Censure of a GOP Leader Says About Michael Whatley

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Rewind to Feb. 15, 2021—Presidents Day. 

N.C. GOP chairman Michael Whatley calls an emergency session of the party’s Central Committee. Meeting via Zoom, the 30 members vote unanimously to censure one of their own—three-term U.S. Sen. Richard Burr. His offense: Voting to convict then-former President Donald Trump, also a Republican, at his second impeachment trial after the January 6th violence at the Capitol.

Fast-forward to 8:17 a.m. the next day.

A split-screen on CNN’s “New Day” shows anchor John Berman, dressed in a TV uniform of a light-blue shirt, dark-blue blazer, and blue tie with red stripes. 

On the other side is Whatley, also wearing a blazer, but no tie. He’s appearing via Skype from Raleigh and is flanked by the N.C. GOP’s red-white-and-blue banner.

Berman is cordial but professional as he reads from papers on his desk. Whatley, a savvy lawyer more comfortable working behind the scenes, smiles but looks a bit guarded.

“Mr. Chairman, I want to read you a statement,” Berman starts. “[It] says: ‘President Trump is most certainly not the victim here. His words and actions were reckless and he shares responsibility for the disgrace that occurred on January 6.’”

“Is that a statement you agree with?” the anchor asks.

Whatley’s smile is gone.

“Look,” he begins, no doubt aware that those watching at home could well include Trump—“the audience of one,” as some Republicans privately refer to the president. 

“The actions that we saw from the protesters that attacked the Capitol are horrific and unjustified,” Whatley says. “There is no rationale that could excuse the actions of those people that went into the Capitol that caused the violence. And the deaths and injuries that we’ve seen from that are truly horrific.”

Then comes Whatley’s indirect answer to the actual question: “But I think the fault lies with those people who attacked the Capitol.”

Berman points out the statement he read was made by North Carolina’s other Republican senator, Thom Tillis. 

“So, why not censure him?” Berman says.

Whatley responds with a talking point he’ll come to repeat:

“I talked to … hundreds of party volunteers, of party leaders, of activists from every part of the state and they’re very disappointed with the vote that we saw from Senator Burr—particularly after he had said that the impeachment process in the Senate was unconstitutional.”

Fast-forward to later that day.

The Hill, a newspaper popular with Washington politicos, publishes an article about the CNN interview: “North Carolina GOP chair: Fault lies with rioters, not Trump.”

By the time Trump pardoned those January 6 rioters in 2025, he had installed Whatley as national Republican Party chairman.

And now Whatley is the state GOP’s candidate for U.S. Senate, thanks to Trump’s clear-the-field endorsement. It’s his first run for public office.

As Trump’s approval ratings sink to historic lows, Whatley has remained loyal, although he doesn’t mention Trump as much as he did earlier this year. Still, he was among the speakers last week at what was advertised as the “Trump-A-Paloosa”—a GOP midterm convention in Dallas called and headlined by Trump to tout his second-term record.

Many Republican candidates trying to win close races in states and districts where Trump’s poll numbers are under water skipped the event. But Whatley spoke the first night.

“I think the fault lies with those people who attacked the Capitol.”

Michael Whatley

“Under President Trump’s leadership, Republicans passed … tax cuts [that] put thousands of dollars back into the hands of families and seniors,” said Whatley, who spent most of his speech attacking his Democratic opponent, former Gov. Roy Cooper.

Whatley and the White House announced soon after that Trump will stop in North Carolina this week to campaign with the Senate hopeful in Gastonia.

“I am thrilled to welcome @POTUS to my home of Gastonia [on] Wednesday,” Whatley posted on X. “President Trump needs an ally in the Senate and North Carolina needs a fighter. That’s why we will win on November 3.”

Trump’s visit comes as a new poll has Cooper ahead by double digits and Republicans worry that their chances of keeping the Senate seat–now held by Tillis–are slipping away.

Mutual Protection

In 2015, when most Republicans were still betting that Jeb Bush would be their next presidential nominee, Whatley hitched his star to Trump. And, relying on his years of experience as a Washington insider, Whatley did the work, much of it behind the scenes.

“He was the one who arranged for the first [Trump] rally here, in the Greensboro Coliseum complex,” said Marcus Kindley, a three-term chairman of the Guilford County GOP. 

In February 2021, just over a week before the censure of Burr, Whatley told conservative talk show host Pete Kaliner of Charlotte’s WBT radio that the GOP couldn’t afford to retreat from Trump’s “America First” platform.

“We as a party and our candidates have to take the [Trump] agenda and continue to work it,” Whatley said, “because if we try to go back to the policies the party had prior to 2016 and return back to the party of John McCain and Mitt Romney, that’s just not going to work.”

But that didn’t mean Trump would always back the most avid MAGA follower in intra-party fights, at least not in North Carolina. When Raleigh businessman and “Stop the Steal” enthusiast John Kane Jr., mounted a challenge to Whatley’s 2023 re-election bid as state GOP chairman, delegates attending the party’s state convention heard from Trump via a timely Truth Social post.

“The NCGOP has a great chairman in Michael Whatley, who will do a fantastic job leading the Republican Party to historic wins in 2024,” Trump wrote. “Michael has my Complete and Total Endorsement!”

During the convention, Whatley steered clear of an ultimately successful move by some delegates to censure Tillis for working with Democrats on issues such as gay marriage during the Biden administration. 

Over the years, Whatley has not been above changing his views or deleting posts if there was a conflict with Trump’s stands. But Whatley watchers attribute his ascent more to his success in re-building the state GOP and his record in helping others win elections—especially Trump.

“Michael has my Complete and Total Endorsement!”

President Donald Trump

“The man is three for three in North Carolina,” said Charles Hellwig, a longtime GOP political operative in the state. “And Whatley was a huge part of making sure he won those races.” 

In 2020, when Trump lost his re-election bid, the only swing state to stay in his column was North Carolina. It was close—Trump’s victory margin was 1.3 percentage points, but his popularity with rural and blue-collar voters helped N.C. Republican candidates win several key races up and down the ballot.

When Burr voted to convict in 2021, Trump and Whatley had promoted and protected each other for so long that staying silent about Burr’s slight was probably never an option for Whatley. 

He and his campaign did not respond to repeated requests for an interview. 

Whatley Pushes Back

The drama that led to the censure of Burr began on a Saturday afternoon in the hushed Senate chamber.

“The question is on the article of impeachment,” announced a raspy-voiced Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, facing the 99 other senators from his seat on the elevated rostrum. As the Senate’s longest-serving Democrat, Leahy had presided over the trial of the then-former Republican president.

“Senators, how say you? Is the respondent, Donald John Trump, guilty or not guilty?”

It was February 13, 2021—a month and a week after that violent mob of Trump supporters had breached the Capitol, including the Senate chamber, in hopes of disrupting the congressional certification of the 2020 presidential election. They’d come from a rally near the White House, where Trump had repeated false claims that the election was stolen from him and encouraged the crowd to walk to the Capitol.

“A roll call vote is required,” Leahy continued, signaling for the Senate clerk to begin asking the assembled jurors, in alphabetical order, to announce their verdicts.

When the roll call got to Burr, a conservative Republican, the vote was 5-5, with each Democrat so far voting to convict and each Republican to acquit.

“Mr. Burr?”

“Guilty.”

Gasps could be heard in the chamber.

All told, Burr and six other Republican senators joined all the Democrats for a total of 57 votes—a majority—for conviction. But the Constitution required 67. 

So Trump survived a second impeachment. And with his acquittal, he could entertain yet another run for president. A conviction would likely have disqualified him from holding “any office of honor, trust or profit under the United States,” in the words of Article 1, Section 3, Clause 7 of the U.S. Constitution.

Explaining his vote later in a statement, Burr said Trump had “promoted unfounded conspiracy theories to cast doubt on the integrity of a free and fair election because he did not like the results.”

He added: When the Capitol was attacked, Trump “used his office to inflame the situation instead of immediately calling for an end to the assault.”

“The man is three for three in North Carolina. And Whatley was a huge part of making sure he won those races.”

Charles Hellwig, GOP operative

Burr had in the past shown some independence from Trump during his time as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. But few would have called him a maverick, at least compared to most of the other six GOP senators who also answered “guilty” during the roll call. Burr’s votes as a senator were in line with Trump’s positions almost 90% of the time.

Minutes after the Senate vote, Whatley issued a statement—the first GOP official to push back against any of the so-called mutinous home-state senators. 

Whatley’s statement took a measured, legalistic tone: “North Carolina Republicans sent Senator Burr to the United States Senate to uphold the Constitution and his vote today to convict in a trial that he declared unconstitutional is shocking and disappointing.”

The House had voted to impeach Trump a week before he left the White House, but by the time the Senate trial started, Trump was no longer in office. Burr agreed with most of his GOP colleagues that the timing would make an impeachment trial unconstitutional. The full Senate disagreed, the trial was gaveled into session, and Burr voted to convict Trump. 

Whatley appears to have decided that making the point but stopping short of hurling Trump-like insults at fellow party members was important to promote GOP unity and elect Republicans. 

“He was quite right on top of things—not only strategically, but tactically,” said Aubrey Woodard, former chair of the GOP in the 11th congressional district.

Different Reasons

Hunched over their computers around the state, the 30 members of the N.C. GOP’s Central Committee convened their emergency meeting via Zoom on a Monday night—two days after the Senate vote and at the tail end of the Covid pandemic.

Louisiana’s GOP had already censured Sen. Bill Cassidy for his vote. Still to come were a censure vote for a senator in Alaska and two “rebuking” the senators from Pennsylvania and Nebraska. But the Republican parties in two states—Utah and Maine—chose not to punish their senators for voting to convict.

In North Carolina, Whatley turned to the state GOP’s Central Committee—party officers like himself, representatives from the state’s 13 congressional districts, and groups speaking for Republican men and GOP women.

In the end, the vote was unanimous. But at the beginning, their reasons for wanting to censure Burr varied.

“This second impeachment is nothing more than a witch-hunt against a former President who is now a private citizen,” then-Republican National Committeewoman Kyshia Lineberger of Charlotte had posted on social media. “North Carolina was a RED Trump state in 2020 and 2016 … Senator Burr did NOT vote the will of the people and should be held accountable.”

For Moore County’s Miriam Chu, then the committee’s vice chair, it wasn’t about Burr voting to convict Trump.

“It was the hypocrisy that he would, in one breath, say that the [Senate] proceeding was unconstitutional and then say, ‘I voted to convict him anyway,’” she told The Assembly. “For me, that was the problem.”

Virtually every member had heard “an outcry” from rank-and-file Republicans, said Woodard, the former 11th district chair. None agreed with Burr.

“There’s no question it was an emotional time and [Trump] was indicating to his people that we didn’t like the way things happened [with the election],” Woodard said. “But I don’t think he was responsible.”

It wasn’t a long meeting. One participant guessed maybe 15 minutes. 

“North Carolina Republicans sent Senator Burr to the United States Senate to uphold the Constitution and his vote today to convict in a trial that he declared unconstitutional is shocking and disappointing.”

Michael Whatley

Whatley, who led the meeting, had consulted with many of them Sunday about wording. There was also a consensus that the group should act quickly. 

“Two weeks later, it would have been irrelevant,” Chu said. 

Some county GOP groups around the state—including in Wake, Orange, and Lee counties—were already voting or considering their own censures that would ban the senator from entering their headquarters or participating in GOP events.

GOP activist Jim Womack, who heads the Lee County GOP and the Conservative Coalition of North Carolina, was already said to be circulating a possible alternative resolution that accused Burr of, among other things, “gross impropriety,” “disloyalty to the President,” and “failing to uphold the conservative principles of the Republican Party.” 

Womack had run against Whatley for state GOP chairman in 2019, with Chu, who came into GOP politics via the Tea Party, as his vice chair. He lost, but Chu won. And Whatley, who helped pen the Central Committee’s resolution, asked her to submit it in the name of unity.

After the meeting, the committee released its statement, which struck a partisan chord and got national attention: 

“The NCGOP agrees with the strong majority of Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate that the Democrat-led attempt to impeach a former president lies outside the United States Constitution. 

“Now that the Senate has voted to acquit President Trump, we hope that Democrats will set aside their divisive partisan agenda and focus on the American priorities of tackling the Covid-19 pandemic, safely reopening schools and restarting the economy.”

The censure resolution didn’t go as far as many MAGA activists around the state were hoping for. Womack called it “a toothless tiger.”

Partly due to Burr’s long service to the GOP—five terms in the U.S. House, three in the U.S. Senate—the N.C. party was less pugnacious than other states. 

Still, Burr, who had announced years before that he would not seek re-election in 2022, cast the censure as a disturbing sign that the GOP had forfeited its principles to become the Trump Party.

After the central committee’s unanimous vote, Burr called it a “sad day” for N.C. Republicans.

“My party’s leadership,” he said in a statement, “has chosen loyalty to one man over the core principles of the Republican Party and the founders of our great nation.”

Through a spokesperson, Burr declined to be interviewed for this article.

Too Hard on Burr?

Whatley and other Republicans probably didn’t expect the Burr censure to find favor with big-city editorial writers. And they were right.

A sample from Raleigh’s News & Observer: “If anyone is hurting the North Carolina Republican Party, it isn’t Burr. It’s Whatley and other Republican leaders. They are demanding blind loyalty to Trump at the expense of broadening the party’s appeal and winning elections.” 

But some prominent Republicans also criticized the censure. Dan Barry, the former chairman of the Union County GOP, said it was too hard on Burr.

He told The Assembly he got a thank-you call from the senator after reciting Burr’s longtime conservative credentials during an interview with Charlotte’s WCNC-TV.

“I think they’ve just gone overboard,” Barry told the news station. “We need a civics lesson. We’re a republic. We elect people to represent our interests. But they’re also free to vote their conscience. And in this particular time, with Sen. Burr, he voted his conscience.”

In the years since Trump survived his second impeachment and re-entered the political fray, there’s also been more talk and debate about what the future holds for the Republican Party.

In choosing to punish Burr, some say the GOP effectively told people who helped build the state Republican Party—but are put off by Trump—to “love it or leave it.”

Take attorney Bob Orr, who, like thousands of others, switched his registration from Republican to unaffiliated because of January 6 and the Republican response to it. 

In his decades as a devoted Republican, he served as a party chairman in his county and district, worked for a GOP congressman, and helped a Republican gubernatorial candidate. He won four of his five runs for the state Court of Appeals and Supreme Court.

He had already changed his registration before the GOP censured Burr, but the move “confirmed that I had made the right decision,” said Orr, who called the censure “ridiculous.”

“You have a senator and former congressman [in Burr] who had done a very commendable job representing the state and the country,” Orr said. “And you censure him? I mean, really? This showed that the loyalty was not to the Republican Party and the folks over the years who built the Republican Party, but it was completely to Donald Trump and what was, in essence, the MAGA party.”

Orr gives Whatley high marks for using his organizational skills to make the N.C. GOP more competitive at election time. “[Whatley] put a big emphasis on electing Republican judges,” he said. 

But Orr was so put off by Whatley’s loyalty to Trump—and to his own political career—that he agreed to appear in an anti-Whatley TV commercial this year. “Trump loves him because he’s an absolute yes-man. On everything,” Orr said.

Democrats point to how Whatley seems to have softened his once-tough stance on the January 6 rioters.

“Trump loves him because he’s an absolute yes-man. On everything.”

Bob Orr, former Republican state Supreme Court justice

In May, a Trump voter at a campaign stop in Brunswick County asked Whatley whether he’d be with the president on a proposed $1.8 billion federal fund to be paid to those who claim they were victims of “weaponization” by federal prosecutors during the Biden administration.

“I will be because I have been with him since 2015,” Whatley said, according to a recording obtained by Punchbowl News, adding that he thought the Biden administration had “overstretched with ridiculous persecution.” 

After the 2020 election, Whatley agreed with Trump that Democrats had cheated, even though courts and state elections officials found no proof.

Even some Republicans who haven’t left the party say they’re worried about how much influence Trump has in N.C. Republican politics.

Chu, the former GOP vice chair, said she worked well with Whatley. But she also said she wonders whether Trump’s early endorsement in the Senate race will discourage up-and-coming Republicans.

“I don’t know if there were any other candidates more qualified than Michael, because if Donald Trump comes out and endorses somebody, I’m not going to run!” she said with a laugh. “That would be a foolish thing to do.”

Former Gov. Pat McCrory saw his 2022 hopes of winning the Republican nomination for Burr’s Senate seat vanish when Trump endorsed then-U.S. Rep. Ted Budd at the N.C. GOP convention in June 2021. Whatley said at the time that he had not been told Trump planned to do that, and insisted the state party would remain neutral.

In a recent interview, McCrory was skeptical of Whatley’s avowed neutrality. He suggested that Whatley, like many politicians on both sides of the aisle, saw political gain in pleasing whoever had the most power in the party. In this case, Trump.

McCrory said he was told by party officials that there would be no role for any Senate candidates at the convention with Trump. “It ended up not being true,” McCrory said. “So Whatley knew who buttered his bread.”