Sen. Thom Tillis gave a scathing review of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, saying the former Fox News host was “out of his depth” at the Pentagon.
Tillis, after bucking his party by voting against the GOP’s budget bill and then announcing he wouldn’t run for reelection next year, opened up to CNN about Hegseth, whom he voted to confirm to the post in January. Tillis suggested that, had he known then what he knows now, he would have acted differently.
“If all I had was the information on the day of the vote, I‘d certainly vote for him again,” he told The Lead anchor Jake Tapper. “But now I have the information of him being a manager, and I don’t think his probationary period has been very positive.”
“With the passing of time, I think it‘s clear he‘s out of his depth as a manager of a large, complex organization,” Tillis explained, pointing to the March Signal chat in which Hegseth shared attack plans with a journalist and to a CNN report finding that Hegseth didn’t inform the White House before pausing arms shipments to Ukraine.
“That‘s just amateurish,” Tillis said of the latter incident, even as the White House insisted afterward that Donald Trump “has full confidence” in his abilities.
“I mean, that‘s from somebody who doesn‘t understand large organization dynamics,” Tillis added.
The North Carolina senator, who recapped his decision-making process regarding Hegseth’s confirmation to Tapper, said he was now thinking that the Senate Armed Services Committee he had deferred to “was a little bit generous with respect to their assessment of his capabilities as a manager of the world‘s largest, most complex and arguably consequential organization.”
That committee, in a 14-13 party-line vote, advanced Hegseth’s nomination to the full Senate, where Vice President JD Vance cast the tie-breaking vote after reportedly convincing Tillis to come on board at the last minute.
At another point in the interview, Tillis described how he differed with Trump over the Republican budget bill’s Medicaid cuts and thought his advisers were giving him bad advice to go through with it.
When Trump responded by publicly criticizing Tillis and threatening to back a primary challenger, he said to Tapper: “I told the president in another text: now it’s time to start looking for my replacement, because I don’t deal with that kind of bulls–t.”
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