I recently flew with my friend Bill Maher to DC, where he was to have dinner with the Bad Orange Man. I was not attending the dinner, I was just along for the ride…but I was wholeheartedly in support of my friend exhibiting the courage to set an example and communicate to his audience (consisting of tens of millions) a desire to dampen the vitriol and rhetoric, and to telegraph that it accomplishes nothing to reside in our bubbles and hurl insults at each other from 3,000 miles away. 

Instead, he felt strongly that the way to heal the divide in this country was to talk, and listen, to each other…even if we disagree to the point that it makes our blood boil. Starting with himself. That didn't mean Bill's senses left him and he suddenly agreed with Donald Trump about every issue or even most issues. But it also didn't mean that he was dug in on some unhinged ideology or was unwilling to table the vitriol in pursuit of moving forward and having a conversation with someone with whom he mostly disagreed.

The plane ride from LA to DC was tinged with anticipation but also uncertainty. How would it go? Bill had been largely misrepresented as distinctly not supportive of anything Trump does or says which is false; he has agreed with him about the border, and the lost-the-plot-woke crap, as well as other issues. 

But he knew that those things not only never made it through the algorithm to the mainstream or the public…they also never made their way to Trump. He knew, too, that Trump is a loyalist, and that he could believe the worst about Bill because he had never seen anything else. 

We have it on good authority that Donald Trump was feeling the same way at the same time, about Bill. We took bets that the dinner was either going to last 3 minutes or 3 hours but was not going to be somewhere in between and there was not going to be an "eh" outcome (and that on the way home we might be rerouted to Gitmo). 

It lasted 3 hours. 

The plane ride home was an entirely different frequency. Bill is always capable of finding the humor in things, so the comedy was not suddenly absent…and he believes (as most rational people do) that Trump has done some things right and some things wrong, and agreed with him about some things and not others. 

But Bill truly and authentically had come to the firsthand conclusion that Trump was neither hero nor villain, merely an ordinary person with flaws in an extraordinary situation for which he was prepared in some ways and not in others. Bill's honest assessment was that the humble and gracious man with whom he had just spent 3 hours exists and that we, as Americans and if we want to accomplish anything in the next 4 years, need to do everything we can to get to that guy.