A Fighter for Trump. Hold the course, never stop until the mission is complete.

President Trump needs fighters in DC – people who know how Washington really works, who’ve cast the hard votes, and who will stay on course with the President when the pressure builds. Van Hilleary is prepared for the mission.

Van grew up in Rhea County, Tennessee. He attended the University of Tennessee on an Air Force ROTC scholarship, earned his commission as a second lieutenant, and went on to fly 24 combat and combat support missions as a C-130 navigator during Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm. A navigator’s job is not to hope things go right. It’s to know exactly where you are, where you need to go, how to get there, and to hold that course when conditions get rough. Van knows how to stay on mission because he has been doing that his entire life.

President Trump is fighting to turn this country around. He needs people in Congress who will back him up – not slow him down, cut deals behind his back, or drift when the pressure is on. Tennessee’s 6th District needs a representative who doesn’t have a learning curve; someone who has sat in those rooms, cast those votes, and knows from experience what works and what’s just noise. Van has been a navigator. He knows how to read a heading. He knows when a course correction is overdue. And right now, this country is badly off course.

For his service in the Persian Gulf, Van earned two Air Medals, the Aerial Achievement Medal, the National Service Medal, the Kuwaiti Liberation Medal, the Southwest Asia Campaign Medal, and the Outstanding Unit Ribbon. He returned home in 1991. He also holds a law degree from Cumberland School of Law at Samford University, which he received in 1990, one day before volunteering for deployment.

In 1994, Van watched President Clinton push through what was then the largest tax increase in American history. He’d just come home from a war. He’d taken an oath. And he decided that if Washington was going to operate that way, someone from Tennessee was going to go up there and say no. Much like President Trump, no one thought he would win. Van ran for Congress in Tennessee’s 4th Congressional District, a majority-Democrat district, and won. Then he won again. And again. And again. He increased his margin of victory in every single election, finishing his last race with 68% of the vote.

In Congress, Van served on the Armed Services Committee and the House Budget Committee. He took the tough votes to balance the federal budget four times. Those are the only four balanced budgets Congress has produced in the last 55 years. Four. In 55 years. Van was there for all of them. That’s not a resume line. That’s a record.

“He wasn’t there to go along. He was there to get it right. Tennessee needs that again.”

Van left Congress in 2002 to run for Governor of Tennessee. He narrowly lost that race. In the years that followed, he worked in the private sector, and in 2019, Congressman John Rose asked him to serve as his Chief of Staff. Van said yes. He spent six and a half years back in DC to help implement President Trump’s America First agenda and pushing back on every attempt to bring Washington’s dysfunction into Tennessee.

He fixed it before. Washington just forgot what that looks like. He’s going back to remind them.

Van and his wife Meredith have been married for 25 years. They live in Hendersonville and are the proud parents of four children. Tennessee has been home his entire life. That’s not an accident; it’s a choice he’s made over and over again. And it’s exactly why he’s running.