GEOFF BENNETT: Republican Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina is sounding the alarm about the future of his own party.

In his new book, "How to Lose Friends and Antagonize Presidents, Tillis warns that Republican lawmakers are afraid to challenge President Trump, that Congress is surrendering its power, and some of the president's closest advisers are leading him toward failure.

And Senator Tillis joins us now from North Carolina.

Thank you for being with us.

SEN.

THOM TILLIS (R-NC): Thank you.

GEOFF BENNETT: And you write in this book that, unless more Republicans are willing to voice their concerns about the White House, that the country could be headed into what you call perilous waters.

What concerns you the most about the direction of this administration right now?

SEN.

THOM TILLIS: The lack of a feedback loop with Congress, really dating back to when I wrote a letter to my colleagues in the Senate Republican Conference back in April of 2025.

I tried to warn that, if we were not active participants in formulation, execution, and timing of policy, that I was afraid we were going to make the same mistakes that Obama did.

And we're seeing the same thing.

We did not have that feedback loop.

We got a little bit of ahead of our blockers.

The voters can only absorb so much change over a period of time, and I think we exceeded their capacity, and that's a part of what's driving people to the polls.

GEOFF BENNETT: In your book, you estimate that at least 30 Republican senators privately share your concerns about President Trump.

And that's an enormous amount of political power, especially when the president's approval ratings are in the low 30s.

If those senators stood together, wouldn't they have more leverage over the president than he has over any one of them?

Why aren't they using it?

SEN.

THOM TILLIS: That was what I was trying to get at last year, last April.

And I also said in my communication to my colleagues that we will know everything that we need to know about the environment by early first -- fourth quarter last year.

And we did.

We could see that things were not moving quite in the direction that we should have.

And that was really our last chance, in my opinion, to recalibrate before we were going to have -- the only thing we'd have there is lessen the maybe negative impact of the election cycle.

But I believe this was pretty much baked by the fourth quarter that we were going to have challenges.

And back to the point of 30, I will also tell you, on any given day, there are probably 30 Democrat members that don't like what leadership is sending them, and yet they capitulate.

The point that I was trying to make is, if we didn't have that separation, then it was also going to expose the president.

And I communicated that to the president.

I told him, when we were moving too quickly on the so-called Big Beautiful Bill, that, if we weren't careful, he was going to have two of the most miserable years of his life.

And what I meant by that was an election outcome that I don't want.

I want President Trump to be successful.

I want Republicans to have the gavel, but you have got to be smart, you have got to be strategic.

And that separation has only existed in -- episodically.

So, there's maybe one thing concerned a member and they push back a bit.

But we needed a consistent, separate, but equal sort of posture with the president to help him implement policies that on their face were probably OK.

It was the timing and how they went about it that became a problem for the voters.

GEOFF BENNETT: In your view, what's the clearest example of something that the Republican-controlled Congress allowed President Trump to do that they should have stopped?

SEN.

THOM TILLIS: I think the Big Beautiful Bill is probably the best example, because that's an example of where, if we had just passed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that basically make permanent what we passed in 2017, we would have had a huge win that we would be running on right now.

But we -- but we passed health care bills.

You're already seeing the narrative that the health care portion of the bill was the problematic portion that I believe was going to cause some headwinds in this cycle, even more in the 2028 cycle.

That was probably the best example.

I think another one could have been we may have been able to help the president from what I consider to be largely -- I lay the blame at the feet of Pete Hegseth for the execution of the war with Iran.

We should have fairly quickly said, we're glad you went in there, like I told the president.

I'm glad he did.

He's the first president to have the guts to do it.

But we needed an after-action, and we should have pressed on either the war powers resolution or very clear communication to Congress sooner.

And the president should have communicated to the American people why it was important for him to do what he did.

That's another one where we have lost the narrative.

And all people think about is the fact that it's cost them $20, $30 more to fill up their gas tank.

GEOFF BENNETT: Regarding Secretary Hegseth, whom you mentioned, you have called your vote for him one of the biggest regrets of your Senate career.

You had serious reservations about his qualifications and judgment before the vote.

What caused you to set those concerns aside?

SEN.

THOM TILLIS: A unanimous vote from every person on the Senate Armed Services Committee, up to and including one member who had expressed some concerns.

I served on the Senate Armed Services Committee for eight years.

And I decided with the -- with any of the nominations that came out of committees that I wasn't on, on the committee of jurisdiction, that I would put a lot of weight on a unanimous vote, even if it was a party-line vote.

And I did spend the week after -- that he was voted out of committee and before we voted on the floor really trying to find evidence to substantiate the allegations that came out after his confirmation vote.

My goal there was to find information that may be compelling that would convince other members of Armed Services that we may need to hold on voting, if not withdraw his nomination.

But I could not get that information.

So all I had was a committee hearing full of glowing statements about Pete Hegseth and a party-line vote.

And I wasn't going to counter that.

I know it's easy for everybody to say that -- I don't view things and you can't view things at atomic level when you're a U.S.

senator, particularly if you're a serious one who legislates.

I think about the relationship that I have with that committee and many other things that were going on, and I didn't simply want to look like I was bowing to pressure and going against the majority of my colleagues, a unanimous majority of my colleagues who voted them out of committee.

So I deferred to them, and I regret that.

The fact of the matter is, though, if I were presented with the same circumstances, I'd vote the same way again.

GEOFF BENNETT: Does Secretary Hegseth, in your view, deserve to be impeached?

SEN.

THOM TILLIS: You know, I hope the president will simply fire him or get him to move on.

And after the election, I think that we're clearly going to take some losses.

I still hold out the hope that we can have a slim majority in the Senate.

I believe that the House is lost.

It's a matter of what the margins are going to be.

I think the president should take stock.

He should look at the -- some of the root causes behind this rejection.

If the president thinks that the losses next week are about the candidates, I think he's got it completely wrong.

This is about a national environment that's been created in part by his administration and amplified by some of the members who just blindly or are completely moved along without any separation from the president.

But the president needs to own some of the outcome for next week.

We need to learn from it and improve.

GEOFF BENNETT: I want to ask you about the president's approach to Ukraine, because you have been unusually forceful for a Republican in criticizing President Trump's approach to Russia, making clear that Vladimir Putin is the aggressor in all of this and cannot be trusted.

Why do you think the president continues to give Putin the benefit of the doubt?

SEN.

THOM TILLIS: I don't know.

It is frustrating to me.

And I can't explain it.

I don't know how -- well, and there's several layers to it.

I don't know why the president had the kind of relationship that he does or did with Viktor Orban.

I mean, Viktor Orban from Hungary was clearly a wink-and-a-nod friend with Vladimir Putin.

We have Vucic down in Serbia who's been rejected, who was also a buddy of Putin and had a relationship with members of the administration.

Then he'd go to the Republika Srpska with Dodik, who's not in power right now, but effectively one of the most powerful people in Bosnia and Herzegovina, buddies with Putin.

Those are all bad signs, in my opinion.

I have never seen an instance where a Republican president ever wanted to have a relationship with a Russian leader or a USSR leader that wasn't one that was trying to convince them they needed to free their people and become democracies and stop threatening Western democracies.

We can't coexist with Russia with their current -- in their current form.

My God, just this week, they have agreed to start recruiting or through forced labor getting people from North Korea to go.

This is a guy who was described by Witkoff as a humanitarian last week.

Now they're talking about forced labor North Koreans coming to Russia to help them with the war effort in Ukraine, and it's an American administration that thinks that's OK?

GEOFF BENNETT: I wonder, Senator, what do you say to your Republican colleagues who agree with everything that you just said, but don't have the luxury of retiring, as you do?

SEN.

THOM TILLIS: Well, what I would tell my Republican colleagues is to look back to everything I have said for the last 11 years.

The only difference between my -- between me after I decided to retire is that maybe I use a little bit more profanity, and I damn sure don't worry about what I say, because I don't have a campaign to run where I'd have to explain it.

But, my gosh, my position on January 6, my position on Russia, my position on Mueller, my position on tax policy, my position on health care policy all predate before I retired.

So what I would tell my colleagues, come on in, the water's fine.

As long as you're satisfying your people back home, you will get reelected.

And what happens when the president picks winners and losers, you have things like Texas happen, where we're spending hundreds of millions of dollars, when John Cornyn would have walked into that race.

We have spread ourselves out in a negative environment, just like Obama did in 2010, and we're going to get what we get.

Now we have got to learn from it and not let this be what we're stacking up right now.

I think we need to go back on Wednesday of next week and draw a parallel between 2006 and 2026.

And then what we need to do is not repeat the mistake that we made between 2006 and 2008, where we dug ourselves a deeper hole.

If we don't acknowledge that we're a part of this problem, instead of blaming it on other people, we did not execute properly, the American people gave us a chance to govern -- and the premise of the book is we almost -- every party since Obama has mistaken an opportunity to govern as a mandate.

Then they take their eye off the ball, they shove policy down members' throats in Congress that were not fully vetted and not really ready for prime time, and you get what you get.

This environment is no different than the environment Obama created and that Biden created.

I just hope my party figures it out so that we don't repeat the mistake in '28, we gain back some of our losses, and maybe have a shot at the White House.

GEOFF BENNETT: North Carolina Republican Senator Thom Tillis.

The book is "How to Lose Friends and Antagonize Presidents."

Great title.

GEOFF BENNETT: Thanks for making time for us.

We appreciate it.

SEN.

THOM TILLIS: Thank you.