Senator Thom Tillis, the North Carolina Republican who last month said he would not seek re-election, on Wednesday suggested that he regretted casting the deciding vote to confirm Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, calling him ill-suited to lead the Pentagon.
“With the passing of time, I think it’s clear he’s out of his depth as a manager of a large, complex organization,” Mr. Tillis told the CNN anchor Jake Tapper in a wide-ranging interview.
It was Mr. Tillis’ first extensive interview since his surprise announcement on June 29 that he would not run for a third term next year, a decision he made a day after President Trump threatened to back a primary challenger against him because Mr. Tillis had said he opposed the bill carrying Mr. Trump’s domestic agenda.
Mr. Tillis had been in a similar position in January — caught between casting a vote he was not comfortable with and risking Mr. Trump’s political retribution if he didn’t — when Mr. Hegseth’s nomination was before the Senate. The senator worked behind the scenes to corroborate allegations that Mr. Hegseth had abused women, and appealed to the top Senate Republican to pull the nomination, which would have allowed Mr. Tillis to avoid having to publicly cross Mr. Trump.
At the time, the president had been already floating the idea of a primary challenge against Mr. Tillis if he could not be brought to heel, mentioning it to a group of North Carolina lawmakers aboard Air Force One on the day of the vote on Mr. Hegseth’s nomination.
Ultimately, Mr. Tillis capitulated to pressure from the White House and allowed Mr. Hegseth’s nomination to sail through the Senate. By suppressing his concerns about accusations of excessive drinking and abusing women, among other issues, Mr. Tillis was able to temporarily placate Mr. Trump and quiet the chatter of a primary challenge.
In the interview on Wednesday, Mr. Tillis said he did not regret casting that vote for Mr. Hegseth given what he knew at the time, “but now I have the information of him being a manager, and I don’t think that his probationary period’s been very positive.”
Citing Mr. Hegseth’s failure to inform the White House that he had authorized a pause on weapons shipments to Ukraine, Mr. Tillis said: “That’s just amateurish. That’s from somebody who doesn’t understand large organization dynamics.”
Mr. Tillis also suggested he was unhappy with the performance of another cabinet member he had supported, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services. But Mr. Tillis said he based his assessments of both men on judgments by his colleagues at the time of their confirmations.
Mr. Tillis said he had deferred to the Senate Armed Services Committee when it came to evaluating Mr. Hegseth’s ability to do the job of defense secretary and to Senator Bill Cassidy, the Louisiana Republican and physician who chairs the health committee, on Mr. Kennedy’s fitness.
“Quite honestly, the main reason I supported Kennedy was because Bill Cassidy thought that we should see how it plays out,” Mr. Tillis said.
In the interview, Mr. Tillis also said he had privately warned Mr. Trump of the unpopularity of the legislation carrying his domestic policy agenda, which the president signed into law last week.
“I think it’s politically just devastating,” he said.
Democrats agree: The silver lining to the bill’s passage, they said last week, was that it was so unpopular with voters concerned about Medicaid cuts that it could help win them back one, if not both, chambers of Congress in next year’s midterm elections.
Mr. Tillis was one of just three Republican senators who voted against the bill.
In a scathing speech on the Senate floor before its passage, Mr. Tillis ripped into the legislation and into Mr. Trump, who earlier in the day celebrated his retirement announcement online.
“What do I tell 663,000 people in two years or three years, when President Trump breaks his promise by pushing them off of Medicaid because the funding is not there anymore?” Mr. Tillis said.
While Mr. Tillis, now liberated from worrying about his political fate, appeared to speak more candidly in the interview, he still tempered his direct criticisms of Mr. Trump. He pinned the blame for the Medicaid cuts and other unpopular policies not on the president but on unnamed people around him.
“I don’t have a problem with President Trump,” he said. “I’ve got a problem with some of the people I consider to be amateurs advising him. And I want to make it very clear to them: When you act like the president when he’s out of the room, you don’t impress me.”
Annie Karni is a congressional correspondent for The Times. She writes features and profiles, with a recent focus on House Republican leadership.
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