The internet didn’t respond well to Thom Tillis criticizing Pete Hegseth | Opinion
U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis almost seems to have forgotten that he cast the deciding vote to confirm Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth last year.
Read more 3 cases of West Nile Virus reported in Mecklenburg County
The internet, however, has not. And it reminded him of that Wednesday — in excoriating fashion — when Tillis took to social media to rip Hegseth and call for his firing.
“I have never witnessed more inept management of the brave men and women who serve our country,” Tillis wrote on X. “He is intimidated by competence and retreats to ginning up culture wars instead of soberly attending to the vital work of our national defense and the health and well-being of our fighting force.”
A reminder: the disaster that has been Pete Hegseth was completely avoidable, and Tillis can blame himself for it. Hegseth was supremely unqualified from the start, and Tillis had every reason to be skeptical about his leadership before he was even confirmed. And he was, until he folded at the last minute after President Trump threatened a primary challenge. Had Tillis had more of a spine, we might not have this problem.
Tillis may be right about Hegseth’s incompetence, but he’s the wrong person to be complaining about it. Which is why his post received thousands of replies from people who really didn’t want to hear it.
“The senator who had initially opposed Hegseth but was convinced (or coerced?) into giving the deciding vote on Hegseth now has regrets and is calling on POTUS to fire him,” Chuck Todd, the former host of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” wrote.
Read more How Hough’s DeShawn Baker built a football family — and a Charlotte dynasty
Tim Miller, a former Republican consultant who now has a career in media, was much more blunt: “Tom Tillis was the tie-breaking vote putting a drunk weekend talk show co-host in charge of the biggest military in the world and now he’s mad it’s going badly? You did this brother! Nobody made you put a clown atop the pentagon.”
There were hundreds of variations of “This is YOUR FAULT” and “You got what you voted for,” some of them more explicit than others. Many observers reminded Tillis that he is still a U.S. senator, so maybe he should do more than just write a strongly worded social media post. Others pointed out that the use of the words “ginning up” and “soberly” appear to be thinly veiled references to Hegseth’s rumored drinking problem.
Tillis deserves every bit of the criticism he’s getting. After years of watching Tillis undermine his own words with his actions, people are just tired of hearing it. He may be more willing to speak up now that he’s retiring, but he often didn’t have the courage to do so when it mattered. No amount of outrage or clever innuendo is going to change that.
As one commenter put it: “He put his career over his country, and in the end damaged both.”
Deputy Opinion Editor Paige Masten covers politics and the 2026 elections for The Charlotte Observer and The News & Observer.
Read more Fall color guide: The best times to see the leaves change in North Carolina
