You’ve recently been talking a lot about wanting to warn liberals, based on your experience, now that Donald Trump is president-elect. I don’t imagine that many liberals listen to your show, but here you are on the back page of The New York Times Magazine. Here is your liberal audience. What do you want to say to them? Please be better than I was. Please learn from my mistakes. Let’s just take it from 2000: George W. Bush was called an idiot, among other things. It got so bad that Republicans and conservatives just stopped listening to the media, because we made everything about jingoism. And so what happened? The pendulum swung back so far the other way that the next guy who was elected president offered hope and change, but all a lot of people saw was that he, for a while, wasn’t wearing a flag pin. They stopped listening to people on the left. Now we’re here in crazy town. What we need now is for reasonable people to sit down with each other and say: O.K., your guy wasn’t the end of the world. My guy wasn’t the end of the world. How can we talk to each other?

But this guy might actually be the end of the world. It’s why I didn’t vote for him. Because if it’s going to get bad, he could bring out the worst in us. I think he could be one of the most dangerous presidents to ever come into the Oval Office. We have to watch him carefully, but also focus on each other and make this work.

You’ve admitted that you were part of the problem that paved the way to Trump — you’ve expressed regret, for example, for calling President Obama a racist — but I see your role in all of this as a bit more than just “a guy who insulted the president.” I could excuse it, to some degree — I won’t — but I could excuse some of it by saying that I was trying to, in some ways, accomplish what Jon Stewart can accomplish: draw huge crowds, make points and then encourage you to do your own homework. I know I wouldn’t believe me if I heard myself apologizing, so I’m telling you now: Don’t take my word for it. Watch my actions. I don’t care what you think about me. All I care about is saying, Please, don’t make the mistake I made.