Four days after President Trump was sworn in for his second term, his nominee for defense secretary was teetering on the brink of defeat on the Senate floor, and the president was on Air Force One talking about political retribution.
Mr. Trump had gotten word that Senator Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican, planned to oppose Pete Hegseth, the former “Fox & Friends” weekend host who was his choice for Pentagon chief, and who faced accusations of excessive drinking and abusing women. If Mr. Tillis could not be brought to heel by that night, there would be enough Republican “no” votes to sink Mr. Hegseth’s confirmation, a humiliating defeat at the dawn of Mr. Trump’s second term.
Turning to a group of North Carolina lawmakers who were flying with him to survey storm damage in their state, Mr. Trump noted Mr. Tillis’s impending defection and posed a question: Which of them wanted his endorsement for a primary challenge to the senator next year?
The implication was clear: Mr. Tillis’s refusal to back Mr. Hegseth could cost him his seat. By that night, Mr. Tillis, who had been toiling behind the scenes for days to kill Mr. Hegseth’s nomination so he could avoid having to publicly cross Mr. Trump, would vote to confirm Mr. Hegseth to control the most powerful military force in the world.
The story of Mr. Tillis’s secret effort to persuade fellow Republicans to join him in opposing Mr. Hegseth — and his sudden turnabout when it became clear he would be the deciding vote to defeat the nominee — is a tale of political calculation and capitulation by a single G.O.P. senator.
But it also helps explain a broader dynamic at play with Mr. Trump back in the White House, as Republicans in Congress, fearful of reprisal by the president and his supporters, have put aside grave reservations and surrendered to his demands.
The trend has been on display this week in the Senate, where Republicans almost unanimously fell in line to confirm Tulsi Gabbard as the director and national intelligence and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health secretary, elevating them despite grave concerns about their fitness for their posts.
This article is based on interviews with more than a dozen people familiar with Mr. Tillis’s maneuvering and his change of heart, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to detail private discussions.
In a statement from his office, Mr. Tillis disputed the premise of this story and insisted that he was simply performing careful vetting, as he does for all nominees.
“Senator Tillis did his thorough due diligence and stands by his vote to confirm Pete Hegseth, who is already leading the Pentagon and cleaning up the failures of the Biden administration,” the statement said. “It’s clear that there were ulterior personal and political motives of some individuals opposed to his confirmation.”
A Secret Whip Effort
From the beginning, Mr. Tillis, a 64-year-old former management consulting executive who has sought to carve out a lane for himself as a principled and independent Republican in an increasingly tribal party, had concerns about Mr. Hegseth.
The nominee faced accusations of excessive public drinking and had made a secret settlement with a woman who had accused Mr. Hegseth of raping her, an allegation he denied. His own mother had accused him of mistreating women for years in an anguished message she later disavowed. On top of that, there were serious questions about his leadership experience; two nonprofit veterans groups that he headed, from 2008 to 2016, ended up in financial trouble.
Mr. Tillis had often placed himself at the center of bipartisan negotiations, a strategic place to be given the purple politics of his swing state. Now, faced with a nominee he told people he had strong reservations about, the senator, who was up for re-election in 2026, faced a dilemma.
Senator Joni Ernst, the Iowa Republican and former combat veteran and sexual assault survivor, had been a cautionary tale. After she publicly raised concerns about Mr. Hegseth, Mr. Trump’s hard-line supporters applied unrelenting pressure on Ms. Ernst, including threatening a primary challenge to her re-election bid next year. She retreated, saying she would not try to stand in the way of Mr. Hegseth’s confirmation.
In some ways, Mr. Tillis was in an even tougher spot: In a phone call with Mr. Trump just before Christmas, he had committed to supporting all the president’s nominees.
The only way for Mr. Tillis to avoid breaking that promise without having to back Mr. Hegseth was to make sure his nomination never came to a vote at all.
The goal was to round up enough G.O.P. opposition to make the case to Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota and the brand-new and still untested majority leader, that he should scrap the vote altogether rather than allow Mr. Hegseth to be defeated on the floor in a spectacle sure to infuriate Mr. Trump.
It began in December, when Mr. Tillis agreed to be connected with Kat Dugan, a former employee at Concerned Veterans for America, one of the nonprofit organizations that Mr. Hegseth had overseen. Ms. Dugan, a constituent of Mr. Tillis’s who had volunteered for his re-election campaign, shared information that raised enough alarms for the senator that he wanted to dig for more.
He reached out to Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, and said that if his side discovered any other witnesses with information about Mr. Hegseth, he wanted to speak with them, too.
By mid-January, Mr. Reed had. Danielle Hegseth, an ex-sister-in-law of Mr. Hegseth’s who had been interviewed by the F.B.I. in December, was willing to come forward with accusations against Mr. Hegseth if she was formally asked to provide sworn testimony.
Mr. Reed quickly obliged, sending her a request in writing, and giving Mr. Tillis a heads-up that a new and compelling witness was possibly coming forward.
On Sunday, Jan. 19, the day before Mr. Trump was to be inaugurated, Mr. Tillis was briefed on what Danielle Hegseth had to say. It was a shocking account he told colleagues could doom Mr. Hegseth’s chances of confirmation.
Danielle Hegseth said her former brother-in-law frequently drank to excess, including while in military uniform, and was so threatening and abusive toward his second wife, Samantha, that she once hid from him in her closet “because she feared for her personal safety.” She said that Samantha Hegseth was so afraid of Mr. Hegseth’s “erratic and aggressive” behavior that she made a secret plan involving a code word, shared with Danielle Hegseth and another person, to use if she needed to get away from him. The code word was deployed once, Danielle alleged, in 2015 or 2016.
Later that day, Mr. Tillis had a lengthy call with her and her lawyer in which he encouraged Danielle Hegseth to sign an affidavit laying out the disturbing details she was providing. If she did so, Mr. Tillis told her, it would carry weight and potentially move enough Republican votes — including his own, those of Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and potentially others — to sink Mr. Hegseth’s nomination.
Mr. Tillis also told people that he was planning to flag the new witness to Ms. Ernst, who he thought might still be able to be swayed to oppose Mr. Hegseth, and Senator Todd Young of Indiana, another Republican who had only recently pledged to support the nominee, and who he thought might also be persuaded to change his mind.
As Mr. Tillis planned that effort, he was coordinating so closely with Democrats and their aides on the Armed Services panel that they came to see him as a partner in their efforts to slow or stop Mr. Hegseth.
But things were becoming increasingly awkward for the Republican senator. Just hours after his conversation with Danielle Hegseth, news of their phone call leaked to reporters, prompting Mr. Tillis to worry that his quiet fact-finding mission was turning into a media circus.
An Affidavit and a Denial
Inauguration Day came and went without Danielle Hegseth coming forward, and Mr. Hegseth’s nomination still appeared on track. Late on the afternoon that Mr. Trump was sworn in, the Armed Services Committee approved his nomination along party lines, with Ms. Ernst joining the rest of her party in backing him.
But the next day, Ms. Hegseth submitted her testimony to senators in a signed affidavit that she stated was aimed at stopping her former brother-in-law from being confirmed.
“I have been assured that making this public statement will ensure that certain senators who are still on the fence will vote against Hegseth’s confirmation,” she wrote.
Almost immediately, though, her story came into question. Through his lawyer, Mr. Hegseth vociferously denied it and pointed to a statement that Samantha Hegseth had given to NBC News saying that “there was no physical abuse in my marriage.”
But that statement did not address the affidavit’s accusations of threatening and aggressive behavior by Mr. Hegseth that caused Samantha Hegseth to fear for her safety. Tim Parlatore, Mr. Hegseth’s lawyer, sought and received several statements directly rebutting Danielle Hegseth’s account, which he forwarded to Senator Roger Wicker, the Mississippi Republican and chairman of the Armed Services Committee; but Samantha Hegseth declined to provide one.
In any case, Ms. Ernst said in light of Samantha Hegseth’s media comment, Danielle Hegseth’s accusations carried no weight. And a shaken Mr. Tillis privately told colleagues that her statement was a game changer. He still planned to oppose Mr. Hegseth, he said, but he would need corroboration of Danielle Hegseth’s account.
“The nomination is going to go forward,” Mr. Wicker told reporters. He had “grave doubts as to the substance” of the affidavit, he said, and believed that its author “has an ax to grind.”
Two days later, Mr. Tillis reviewed written materials that Danielle Hegseth produced to corroborate her account. Still, when it came time for a test vote on Mr. Hegseth’s nomination, Mr. Tillis voted “yes,” even as he told reporters he was still doing “due diligence” on Mr. Hegseth.
Only two Republicans voted against Mr. Hegseth that day: Ms. Murkowski and Ms. Collins.
A Hard No Turns to a Yes
Senators Collins and Murkowski were perplexed that Mr. Tillis would support advancing the nomination given all his behind-the-scenes sleuthing, but he reached out to them right after the test vote for a meeting. As the trio huddled in Ms. Collins’s private Senate hideaway office overlooking the National Mall, Mr. Tillis assured the pair that he remained opposed to the nomination and was locked down as a “no.” He headed to tell Mr. Thune.
The meeting did not go as Mr. Tillis had hoped. He told the Senate majority leader that he was opposed to Mr. Hegseth’s confirmation and believed that three other Republicans — Ms. Collins, Ms. Murkowski and Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky — would be as well, meaning his nomination would fail on the floor. Mr. Thune needed to tell Mr. Trump he was a “no” and cancel the vote set for the next evening.
Mr. Thune refused to even consider scrapping the vote and said that if Mr. Tillis intended to bring down the nominee, he should tell Mr. Trump’s team himself.
Later that evening, Mr. Tillis went to the White House to meet with Vice President JD Vance. He complained about the pressure being applied to Republican senators to fall in line, and he continued to insist that he was opposed to Mr. Hegseth. That night, he also spoke by phone with Mr. Trump. The president, rarely confrontational in person, did not ask outright that he vote for Mr. Hegseth, and Mr. Tillis made it clear that he still had questions about his nominee.
Still, White House officials were already sensing that he might be ready to give in. On the day of the vote, several senior aides to Mr. Trump and people close to Mr. Hegseth said they thought Mr. Tillis was too weak to hold out and would ultimately change his mind rather than cast a vote that would end his career. On Air Force One, Mr. Trump made it clear he was willing to play hardball against Mr. Tillis as payback for such a defection.
Mr. Tillis called Danielle Hegseth’s lawyer repeatedly that Friday, saying that he believed her client. But back at the Capitol, Mr. Reed’s team started to get nervous around noon, when Mr. Tillis stopped returning their calls. By 5 p.m., just hours before the vote, they still had not heard from him.
What they did not know was that Mr. Tillis, having failed to head off the vote, was now leaning toward voting “yes” and was doing some final negotiating of his own. On Friday, he met with Mr. Hegseth himself, and asked for a detailed letter rebutting Danielle Hegseth’s affidavit.
Mr. Tillis received the letter about an hour before the vote, and Mr. Hegseth posted it on social media as the roll was being called on the Senate floor.
Around that time, Mr. Tillis spoke to Mr. Trump briefly and told him that he was about to vote “yes” on his nominee. At 9:09 p.m., five minutes after Mr. Hegseth posted his statement online and as the vote was already underway, Mr. Tillis released a statement announcing that he planned to support Mr. Hegseth.
On the Senate floor, Ms. Collins and Ms. Murkowski, seated at their side-by-side desks, could be seen staring at him coldly, Ms. Collins with her arms crossed, as Mr. Tillis faced them, gesticulating animatedly as he appeared to explain his turnabout.
In the end, only Mr. McConnell joined the two women in opposition among Republicans, after releasing a lengthy statement in which he questioned whether Mr. Hegseth was up to the post of Pentagon chief.
Mr. Hegseth was confirmed at 9:50 p.m., after Mr. Vance was shuttled to the Capitol to break the tie on what would be the narrowest vote to confirm a defense secretary in modern history. Mr. Hegseth’s family watched from the visitor’s gallery above; later, he would recount that one of his children had remarked that he “won in overtime.”
As for Mr. Tillis, he avoided political punishment — at least for the moment.
On the afternoon of Feb. 7, exactly two weeks after Mr. Trump had mused aloud on Air Force One about ending the senator’s political career, he had a guest aboard the presidential aircraft as he made his way to South Florida: Thom Tillis, who cast the deciding vote to save his defense secretary.
The post As Trump Threatened a Primary, a G.O.P. Holdout on Hegseth Flipped appeared first on New York Times.
