Sen. Thom Tillis calls his Hegseth confirmation vote the biggest regret of his career and says he should have stopped RFK Jr. too.

Local reporting out of Raleigh lays out the North Carolina Republican’s account in a forthcoming book: his January 2025 deciding vote for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth now tops the list of career mistakes, and he said that he also “should’ve stopped” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from taking over Health and Human Services in the early days of President Donald Trump’s second term.

The memoir, titled “How to Lose Friends and Antagonize Presidents,” is set for release Tuesday. Tillis is finishing his final months in the Senate after announcing last year he would not seek reelection.

On the night of Jan. 24, 2025, his vote made the Hegseth confirmation 50-50. Vice President JD Vance then broke the tie. Tillis describes weighing the choice in talks with the White House, people who had worked with Hegseth, and Hegseth himself. He says he could not corroborate the worst allegations about management style, treatment of women, and excessive drinking, and he supported confirmation at the time.

Breitbart notes the same core admission: that deciding vote is now framed as the “biggest regret of my career.”

He cast the tie-making vote, then rewrote the story later

Tillis is blunt about the politics that shaped the moment. He said he had no intention of letting colleagues “outsource their courage” to him on a “questionable nomination.” He did not want to be “the lone voice in the wilderness.”

"I had no intention of letting my colleagues outsource their courage to me while they pretended to go along with the questionable nomination President Trump had put forward."

That is the senator’s own standard, applied after the fact. Confirmation votes are recorded. Second thoughts in a book are not a substitute for the roll call.

He extends the regret to Kennedy. “I guess it’s easy to say now, but I’m the one who has to live with that vote and all the havoc Kennedy’s tenure has caused the country as a result,” Tillis said. The “havoc” claim is his assessment; the vote record is not in dispute.

The Washington Examiner reports he also voices early reservations about other initial Cabinet picks, including Tulsi Gabbard and Kristi Noem, along with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

Controversy around Hegseth did not end with confirmation. Internal friction later surfaced in coverage of Army Secretary Dan Driscoll’s exit after months of tension at the Pentagon.

Private doubts, public praise, and a count of thirty

Tillis goes further on his own party. He said that he can count at least 30 Republican colleagues who voiced private reservations about the president’s actions, then offered only praise when cameras and microphones appeared.

"I know for a fact that there are others like me, 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."

Just The News carries the same passage and underscores that Hegseth’s confirmation already faced allegations on management, treatment of women, and drinking before the late-night vote.

In Tillis’s telling, fear of career damage drove early compliance. He also sketches the bind he saw: oppose and lose influence, or oppose and lose outright and end up weaker still. Those are his words about incentives inside the conference, not a verdict on the nominees’ records.

Separate from the book, House drama has kept Hegseth in the political crosshairs, including a push that left impeachment efforts shelved until after the midterms.

Medicaid fight became the breaking point

The rupture with Trump widened over the tax and spending package Tillis opposed over Medicaid cuts. In June 2025 he announced he would not run again. He said that he thought, “I’m done,” and texted the president to start looking for a replacement. Trump replied, “I am! DJT.”

“Everyone reaches a breaking point,” Tillis said of that stretch.

In May 2026, Trump hit him again on social media as a “QUITTER!” Tillis closes the book with a raw text back: “I care if you fail and right now we are failing.”

He still calls Trump “an amazing political talent.” In the same breath he draws a line: “my beef is not with him, but the idiots he’s got working for him.” He urges Republicans to “wake up,” warning that failing to course-correct “comes back to bite the majority party in the a**.” He predicts a midterm “bloodbath”: “All along, we’ve had multiple chances to get off the path and avoid the giant bronze monster chasing us down.”

On foreign policy he says he initially backed the Iran war effort, then criticized the handling and argued the war needed “Pete Hegseth the h*** out of the way.” He also faults tariffs and aggressive immigration raids. Those critiques are Tillis’s. The administration’s border and trade aims remain a core conservative priority for voters who wanted enforcement and leverage restored.

Other voices have piled on from different directions, including a former Biden-era Air Force secretary’s attack on Hegseth’s leadership. Outgoing Republicans have also aired replacement talk after high-level exits, a thread seen when a retiring GOP senator urged a Hegseth change following the Army secretary’s departure plans.

Votes count; memoirs come later

Tillis owned the decisive Hegseth vote when it mattered and owned the Kennedy vote in the same early window. He now wants readers to treat both as warnings. He names private dissenters by count, not by name. He faults colleagues for parking their courage with him while they stayed quiet in public.

Senate confirmations are how personnel becomes policy. Senators who cast yes votes under pressure can draft books afterward. They cannot unwind the roll call. Tillis says he refused to be the lone holdout then and refuses to carry the silence now. Readers can weigh the timeline themselves: the late-night talks, the 50-50 tally, Vance’s tie-break, the later Medicaid clash, the non-run announcement, and the final months of score-settling in print.

Personnel mistakes, if they are mistakes, get fixed by results and by new decisions, not by retrospective chapters alone. Republicans who wanted a hardened Pentagon and a shake-up at HHS got votes in January 2025. The senator who provided the margin now says he regrets it. That is on the record, in his own words, as he walks out the door.

Governing still rewards the people who vote their judgment in real time, and live with it without waiting for a book tour.