Thom Tillis Unloads on Hegseth, Ken Paxton in Weekend Tantrum as GOP’s Establishment Wing Faces Extinction
Like every Republican who loudly announces their retirement and bemoans the passing of the establishment in doing so, North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis is making sure to burn as many bridges with President Donald Trump and his administration as the media will allow him to get coverage for.
That was at least twice this past weekend, both in an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union.” (For if one were to ever pick a venue to burn bridges in when you’re burning them inside the Beltway, it would be the Sunday morning current affairs chat show: Those remnants of a different age now only watched by politicos and wonks, while the rest of the world orders DoorDash and binges on”The Obscenely Rich Hockey-Wife Housewives of Fort Lauderdale.”)
In one of his rants, he decided to go after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, calling him a man who made “Kristi Noem look like a five-star recruit,” and Texas Senate Republican candidate Ken Paxton an undeserving “failure” who would be “nothing but an anchor on our conference” in the upper chamber.
The first came when Jake Tapper asked Tillis if he was “advised well” by the head of the Pentagon on the Iran issue.
“No, I actually — if you take a look at the assessment that Hegseth gave — at the end of the day, regardless of who collected the information, Hegseth owns it by being secretary of Defense,” he said.
“When you tell the president that you have ‘obliterated’ Iran and you’re in a position to pretty much dictate terms, and now you see what we have, when you see Hegseth pull back on operations in Poland, when Ukraine — when Russia is raping, killing, murdering, torturing countless people in Ukraine, when you see these mistakes made by Hegseth, I have — I actually — I think, with all these mistakes in total, it’s beginning to make Kristi Noem look like a five-star recruit,” he added.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth "makes Kristi Noem look like a 5 star recruit”
– Senator Tom Tillis (R-NC) on U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. @atrupar (2026) pic.twitter.com/vpBOyCv6KE
— The Intellectualist (@highbrow_nobrow) May 24, 2026