Outgoing Sen. Thom Tillis calls his vote for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth the biggest regret of his career, saying colleagues went along too far.
Retiring North Carolina Republican Just the News reports that Thom Tillis, in a new book, now brands his 2025 yes vote on Pete Hegseth as the “biggest regret of my career.”
The memoir, titled “How to Lose Friends and Antagonize Presidents,” is set for release Tuesday and was reviewed by the Associated Press. Tillis’s vote helped lock a 50-50 Senate tally. Vice President JD Vance then cast the tie-breaking vote that put Hegseth in charge at the Pentagon.
Tillis is leaving office after announcing in June he would not seek a third term. The 66-year-old began his political climb in 2002 on the park board in Cornelius, North Carolina, and won his Senate seat in 2014. He has repeatedly clashed with President Donald Trump.
In the book, Tillis does not stop at personal regret. He paints a wider picture of Republicans who, in his telling, folded early.
He writes that he is not alone.
"I know for a fact that there are others like me,"
Tillis continues in the same passage:
"Republicans who agreed to go along with the early demands of the Trump team no matter how ridiculous they were, believing that failing to do so would mean the end of their political career, and who now see that things have gone way too far."
Breitbart notes the decisive Hegseth vote fell on Jan. 24, 2025, and that Tillis now says he also should have blocked Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s confirmation to lead Health and Human Services.
Tillis faults colleagues who voiced private doubts while offering public praise. He also airs objections to tariffs, immigration enforcement raids, handling of the Iran conflict, and other Cabinet picks, including Tulsi Gabbard, Kristi Noem, and Howard Lutnick. He predicts a rough midterm and urges senators to push back harder against executive power.
Those lines arrive from a senator already headed for the exit. His break with Trump over a tax and spending package and Medicaid cuts came before the retirement announcement. The book now packages the grievances for sale.
Just the News recounts that Hegseth’s path to confirmation was tangled by allegations about management style, treatment of women, and excessive drinking. Democrats and some skeptics inside the party used those claims to try to sink the nomination. The final floor count still deadlocked at 50-50 until Vance broke the tie.
Tillis’s late turn against that vote lands amid a broader campaign to drive Hegseth out. House Democrats have already begun laying groundwork to impeach Pete Hegseth if they reclaim the majority, treating personnel fights as a standing political project rather than a closed confirmation fight.
On the Republican side, the pressure has not been uniform. Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie has gone further than most, filing a detailed set of charges in a separate push that put eight impeachment articles against Hegseth into the public record.
Tillis himself has not stayed quiet since the confirmation. Coverage of his later posture shows the North Carolina senator backing efforts to remove Hegseth and arguing the Pentagon chief “needs to go,” a sharper line than a single book passage of regret.
The sequence matters. Tillis voted yes in 2025. Vance supplied the tie-breaker. Hegseth took the job. Only afterward, with retirement set and a book on the calendar, did Tillis elevate that ballot into the defining regret of a career that stretches back more than two decades.
He offers no roll-call companions by name when he says others feel as he does. He describes fear of career death as the reason Republicans cleared early nominees, then declares that “things have gone way too far.” The indictment is broad. The evidence he puts on the table is his own second thoughts.
While Tillis writes about regret, Hegseth has moved on personnel and structure inside the department, including a plan that targets 20% of general and admiral slots in a bid to shrink top-heavy bureaucracy. That is the live fight in the building Tillis now says he wishes he had kept closed.
Voters sent Trump back with a clear mandate on defense leadership, borders, and a hard reset at federal agencies. Tillis’s memoir asks readers to treat his converted no as wisdom. The record still shows a sitting senator who helped make the decisive tally, then rebranded the choice once the personal cost of dissent had fallen to zero.
Second thoughts make neat book copy. They do not rewrite the vote that already counted.
