- Senator Alexander, you have had the opportunity to work with 10 different US presidents, which is just amazing to me.

What would you say about each one of those individuals that maybe you learned from or you were impacted by?

What was that?

- From Richard Nixon, I learned that if you make a mistake, announce it, and take the consequences.

He was on his way to being one of the most consequential presidents, and he lied about Watergate, and he lost the presidency.

From Gerald Ford, I learned, do the right thing, even though it might be politically damaging.

He pardoned Nixon.

That was painful to me.

I was running for governor then as a Republican, and that helped me lose.

He pardoned those who went to Canada to avoid the Vietnam War, but he put those things behind us, and that was good for the country.

Jimmy Carter, what I learned from him was, if you're gonna go to Washington, take some people with you who know the town, (laughs) because he didn't know much about Washington, and neither did the people he brought with him.

They were good people, but it was late in his term before he was able to accomplish very much.

From Reagan, I learned the value of having a team of rivals as advisors, by that, I mean people who had run against him, HW Bush, Bush's campaign manager, Howard Baker, who were broad gauged and understood all the nuances of the White House to advise him.

From Bush, there are many lessons, but one is courtesy.

I mean, he never called attention to himself, although he was tremendously successful in foreign affairs.

Clinton learned a lot about politics.

He was of my generation.

We were elected the same day.

He was the best politician of the 10 presidents that I knew.

George W. Bush was the most normal.

I mean, he welcomed being born on third base, rather than treated as an excuse for a weekly therapy session.

(Becky laughs) He was the guy you'd wanna go out and have a cigar with on the White House porch, or go to a ball game with.

Obama, I guess, was next.

From President Obama, I learned that you need human skills as well as intellectual skills, a lesson my mother taught me a long time ago.

Obama was usually the smartest guy in the room, but his human skills weren't as good.

We worked together well toward the end of his term, and he was good to his word.

Senator Blunt said Donald Trump, by noon, every day, has done almost everything our mothers taught us not to do.

(both laugh) But what I learned from him, he was a very skillful communicator.

I mean, for his day, Reagan was the great communicator, but for his day, Trump left all the rest of us in the dust.

- [Becky] Wow.

- He understood social media.

He used it, still uses it, and he speaks in plain English, and language that people can understand.

- What about President Biden?

- I forgot Biden.

Biden was an excellent senator, well-liked, had a big heart, but he seemed to me to be more of a legislator in chief than a commander in chief.

He never made the transition from whatever it was, 36 years as a senator, to an executive position.

- And now Trump's back.

How do you feel now?

You're not working with him?

- No, I'm not working with him now.

I feel the same way.

I think President Trump would do well to take advice from Republican senators from his staff.

In his first term, when he would do things like try to use $3.6 billion to build the border wall, but the Senate had appropriated to build military barracks at Fort Campbell or schools, we said, "No, you can't do that."

22 of us did, Republicans, and then 12 of us voted against it, and overturned what he was doing.

He vetoed that.

The courts then said he was wrong.

So I would like to see the president ask the Senate, for example, for authority to remove the nuclear weapons from Iran, by force, if necessary.

Some American president probably is gonna have to use force, but he'd be better off if he worked and listened more to the other branch of government.