On Jan. 8, 2021, just after retiring from the Senate, Lamar Alexander returned to the U.S. Capitol for his COVID booster and surveyed the wreckage of an attempted coup two days prior.

Pieces of glasses and shattered windows by the Senate entrance. Broken benches, doors split open.

“What I saw turned my stomach,” Alexander wrote in his soon-to-be released memoir.

He stayed largely silent for more than five years. But now, the three-term senator, two-term governor and former education secretary has penned a more-than-500-page tome, “The Education Of A Senator”, and gets a lot of things off his chest.

“Trump undermined the United States Constitution and assaulted one of the most hallowed precepts of the American democracy, the peaceful transfer of power,” Alexander wrote, noting that Trump ignored pleas to stop the Jan. 6 rioters.

“If those actions do not constitute a ‘high crime or misdemeanor,’ I do not know what does,” he wrote.

In a wide-ranging interview ahead of next week’s book release, Alexander explained that he still believes in public service, even if it might seem naive in these sharply divided times.

“I wanted to try to persuade, hopefully inspire, the reader that the best way to help the most people and be a part of keeping the republic from falling apart, is to ignore all the indignities and figure out how to get yourself elected to public office,” he said.

But he also used the writing process to vent, even with his gentile Southern manners, about today’s Senate Republican Conference for failing to stand up to Trump during the first year of his second term. He cited a “long list” of actions that included the pardons for Jan. 6 rioters, deep cuts to medical research and weaponizing the Justice Department against the president’s enemies.

“The only senator who consistently earned a gold star for asserting the Senate’s constitutional prerogatives was Rand Paul,” said Alexander, who rarely aligned himself with the libertarian-leaning Kentucky senator.

The former senator believes that in the last few months he has seen some resistance to Trump’s executive power grabs, including Majority Leader John Thune’s defense of the legislative filibuster. By and large, however, Alexander wants more senators to assert themselves.

“Well, it’s not worth running for the Senate if all you’re going to do is sit there and make a speech and parrot the President’s point of view,” he said.

Alexander, now 85, never lacked his own ambition. In the summer of 1963, he landed an internship in Robert F. Kennedy’s Justice Department, then helped elect a future Senate majority leader, Howard Baker, starting Tennessee’s GOP revolution in 1966.

By January 1969, he took a job 50 feet away from Richard Nixon’s Oval Office working for the legendary Bryce Harlow, the head of legislative affairs.

He almost ran for Senate at the age of 29 (he would’ve turned 30 before Election Day) and did run for governor four years later and got creamed, the Watergate 1974 midterms not exactly being friendly times for Republicans.

By 1978, he put on a plaid shirt and walked more than 1,000 miles across Tennessee to kickstart his campaign, which he won, and had top Democrats handing him the keys to power early to stop the unethical pardons.

Those wins set in motion a period where Tennessee cranked out a series of successful lawmakers who included two Senate majority leaders, a vice president and four Senate committee chairs.

“You had really strong competition between the parties, and that tended to attract talented people,” he said, comparing that era to today’s Southeastern Conference in college football. “We didn’t have one party trying to throw the immigrants off the cliff and the other party trying to create a socialist state.”

His successful run as governor helped fuel a stint as university president and time in George H.W. Bush’s Cabinet — preludes to two unsuccessful runs for president.

In 1994, Bill Frist, then a young Nashville heart surgeon, sought Alexander’s advice about a Senate bid, explaining that saving one life with a transplant is amazing but that he wanted to have a bigger impact.

Frist won and went on to become Senate majority leader.

“Thomas Edison and Billy Graham and other private citizens can do a lot, but the most reliable way to make the most difference, he learned, and I learned, is in public office,” Alexander said.

Alexander was always the consummate Senate man — he met his wife, Honey, while she played softball on a competing team in the Senate softball league in 1967 — so he found his true calling in 2002 when he won a seat in the upper chamber.

His rise up the ladder seemed destined to reach Baker’s old office of Republican leader, but he resigned from the No. 3 leadership post in 2012 and focused most of his energy on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.

His legislative output, often paired up with the panel’s top Democrat back then, Sen. Patty Murray, rivaled anyone in Congress for that decade.

An act helping the national parks, a massive health research bill, comprehensive legislation battling the opioid epidemic – all won approval with massive bipartisan majorities.

“I miss him a lot,” Murray told NOTUS on Thursday. “He was somebody I could talk with privately or sit down and work with and there was a mutual respect. It has been very difficult here without people like him.”

Democrats tended to believe that they could get Alexander to their side on critical issues, whether it was convincing then-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to allow a Supreme Court confirmation process on Merrick Garland or possibly vote to convict Trump in the 2020 impeachment trial.

He never betrayed the confidence of McConnell, a friend for more than 50 years, and he maintained a decent relationship with the reality TV star-turned-president, despite their very different approaches to public life.

Some will no doubt find his new criticism of Trump and sycophantish Republicans as convenient timing, now that he doesn’t have to face a GOP primary electorate.

Murray offered no such criticism and said that today’s senators lack the spine to negotiate deals like Alexander did.

“Right now Trump has total control over them,” she said.

Alexander acknowledged that in today’s environment he might struggle to win a GOP primary as a courteous conservative. His last race, in 2014, saw him win the GOP nomination by less than 10 points.

“I hope I wouldn’t have changed my views too much in order to attract primary voters,” he said of the hypothetical race.

His decision to retire in early January 2021 proved to be providential. Honey Alexander suffered a stroke in late 2020, and for the next two years he cared for her until her death in late 2022.

“Our Best Years,” he titled that chapter of his book, which starts off with two words on a nearly blank white dedication page:

“For Honey.”

The Capitol attack was a before/after moment for Alexander, believing that his party needed a clearer break from Trump. That walk through the building two days later haunted him.

“I was so shocked by what I saw that I didn’t want to say anything at the time,” he said in the interview.

Both in Tennessee and across the nation, he confessed a strange hope for how to move the Republican Party beyond Trumpism.

“I quietly wish the Democrats could be more effective. Because if the Democrats could win more races, the Republicans would shape up, they would,” he said. “I mean, as long as the Democrats wallow on the left hand side of the road, Republicans are going to be free to wallow on the right hand side of the road in the extreme.”

He pointed to Trump’s dismal approval ratings and the ongoing political malaise for Democrats as reasons for hope that each party will get the message from 2026 and recalibrate for 2028.

“That will produce Republican and Democratic nominees who are very different than Donald Trump,” Alexander said. “Hopefully, people whose use of language, demeanor, temperament and character are more consistent with what we’ve had over the years in the American presidency.”

Lamar Unplugged

The former GOP senator explored the last few decades of politics in an hourlong interview with NOTUS ahead of the release of his new book. Here are some highlights:

On the GOP early last decade:

Unheeded advice he gave Trump in early 2017:

On January 6, 2021:

On the weak response of Senate Republicans to Trump’s second term:

On Joe Biden’s presidency:

On the two parties 2028 nominees: