“Tillis calls Hegseth vote his 'biggest regret'”, 5 October 2026 (Photo via The Hill — the original report)
As it ran on the front
I'm going to read you a list. Four things, off the wire, in order. I'm not going to add anything to it, and I'm not going to tell you what to think about it. I wrote this down because I didn't trust myself to remember it right, and when I checked, it was worse than I remembered, so here it is, plain.
September 2nd: Senator Thom Tillis calls on the President to fire Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, citing what he calls "inept management" of the military.…
…(cont) September 2nd, the same day: Army Secretary Dan Driscoll resigns, and the senator says, "I have never witnessed more inept management."
September 18th: the senator says of the Secretary, "He needs to go," and backs a resolution to impeach him.
October 5th: the senator's memoir, out this week, titled "How to Lose Friends and Antagonize Presidents," calls his own vote to confirm that same Secretary the "biggest regret" of his career.
That's the list. Four things on it. Three different days.
I've got a car — the fan belt's going, I know it's going, everybody who's ridden with me knows it's going — and there's a toll plaza on the way to my sister's, the old kind, where you stop, you hand the man the money, the gate goes up, and that's it. You're through. There's no window where you lean out and tell the guy in the booth you've changed your mind about the seventy-five cents. You don't drive the whole route to your sister's and then, a month later, mail the toll authority a letter saying the booth back there was the biggest regret of your life, kindly advise on a refund.
I'm not saying a Senate confirmation vote is a toll booth. I'm asking whether it's supposed to work like one. Did the senator vote to confirm the Secretary? The record says yes. Did the same senator, on September 2nd, call that Secretary's management inept? Record says yes. Did he, on September 18th, back a resolution to remove him? Yes. Is the Secretary still the Secretary, as of this week? He is. Did any of the four things on that list undo the first one?
I went back and forth on this. A vote is a vote — you cast it, it's cast, same as the toll. But a toll booth doesn't let you also stand at the gate for a month afterward yelling at the booth. That's the part I keep stopping on. He didn't just regret it quietly, in a memoir, once, on his way out. He spent September asking the President to fire the man he'd voted to put there, and then he spent October explaining the vote in a book.
One more thing, since you're already up to go — is the senator running for reelection this cycle? He is not; he announced that already. Does the book land before he leaves the Senate, or after? So who, exactly, gets to vote on the regret? Not the voters of North Carolina — he's not asking them for anything. Not the Senate — there's no motion on the floor undoing a confirmation that's already a year old. Just the Secretary, who's still the Secretary, and the reader, who's holding the same four things I just read you, in the same order, and wondering, same as I am, what a 'biggest regret' is supposed to fix if nobody with a vote left is around to cast it.
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“He had the one lever a senator's got — the vote — and he used it to put a guy in charge of the whole Pentagon, then spent a month asking somebody else to clean it up, then wrote a book about it on his way out the door with nothing left to lose. That's not regret, that's a receipt with his signature already dry. The war's still running at forty billion and climbing, the Secretary's still the Secretary, and the only thing that changed is the senator's retirement plan now includes a book tour.”
“Look, this is accountability — the Senator is modeling exactly the kind of honest self-reflection we want from public servants, admitting a mistake instead of just — wait, he's the one who could've voted no, he's a sitting United States Senator, the vote was his to cast. Did I say that? That's not — let's just say the book speaks for itself. It's a leadership story. That's the line.”
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) wrote in his upcoming book that he views his confirmation vote for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as the "biggest regret" of his career. Tillis's upcoming memoir — "How to Lose Friends and Antagonize Presidents," which will hit the shelves Tuesday — breaks down how he was skeptical of allegations made about...
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) is finishing his final months in the Senate on an introspective note, revealing in a new book that the “biggest regret of my career” was his vote to confirm War Secretary Pete Hegseth.
In an extended interview with 60 Minutes correspondent Ross Douthat, Sen. Thom Tillis details why he considers some in President Trump's inner circle "sycophants," and also discusses the Iran war and what awaits the Republican party in the midterms and 2028.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.
