Former President Bill Clinton told CBS in an interview aired Sunday that his “mother woulda whipped me for five days in a row when I was a little boy if I spent all my time badmouthing people” like President Trump.

“I don’t like all this,” he said of political rhetoric today. “I couldn’t be elected anything now ’cause I just don’t like embarrassing people.”

Clinton has co-authored a novel with best-selling author James Patterson, The President Is Missing, due to be released Monday. In the thriller, the president takes on an international terrorist plot, at one point getting into a shootout at Nationals Park.

“We got a real serious problem with the cyber terrorism that could go way beyond fixin’ the elections. And those problems will happen faster if we allow our elections to continue to be tampered with by others,” Clinton said. Asked if the 2016 election meddling skewed the results, he replied, “I don’t know.”

In his novel, the fictional president is under threat of impeachment.

“Well, I knew it wouldn’t succeed,” Clinton said of his own impeachment. “It wasn’t a pleasant experience. But it was a fight that I was glad to undertake after the elections, when the people had solidly told by two-thirds or more, the Republicans to stop it. They knew there was nothin’ impeachable. And so, we fought it to the end. And I’m glad.”

Clinton said if Trump was a Democrat “most people I know in Washington believe impeachment hearings would have begun already.”

Clinton noted that he walks his dogs daily past the home of a Trump-supporting neighbor with a “lock her up” poster in his front window.

“And I said to him, ‘If you’re gonna do that to my wife, you make sure the prisons are comfortable. Cause you’re gonna have a lot of company of your supporters in there,'” he added. “And you know what he said? So, I was just tryin’ to, you know, ju — you know, be civil to him. And he said, ‘Obama and Hillary started the second Civil War.’ So, there’s division. But underneath that, there’s a core of fundamental decency that can be really skewed when people feel abused, left out, or looked down on.”