A decade after the two hosts last sparred on air, “The Daily Show” host Jon Stewart and former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly reunited Tuesday and continued the debate — though compared to the extremes of today, they were more friends than foe.
O’Reilly acknowledged in the beginning that the pair “have a history.”
“If you Google Stewart and I, we are able to disagree, without hating each other. Now, I truly hate him — but I don’t show it,” O’Reilly joked.
“But you hold it very well,” Stewart said.
There was only one topic to talk about Tuesday: the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump, the motive of which is still unknown.
O’Reilly called for calm, criticizing some, including a TV talk show, for what he said was emphasizing the fact that the alleged shooter was a registered Republican, to which Stewart pushed back.
“You and I are both somewhat fossilized practitioners of the rhetorical arts that are confrontational at times, provocative at times,” Stewart said. “And we made a really spectacular living pushing those envelopes.”
Stewart and O’Reilly have a history of on-air conflict, mirroring two opposite viewpoints, with O’Reilly the conservative foil to Stewart, and vice versa.
O’Reilly last appeared on “The Daily Show” in 2014, when the two got into an animated discussion about race and white privilege. The pair previously had a 2012 charity debate dubbed “The Rumble in the Air-Conditioned Auditorium.”
Stewart left “The Daily Show” in 2015. O’Reilly was dismissed by Fox in 2017 amid claims of sexual harassment. He denied the claims.
Stewart returned to “The Daily Show” this year to host Mondays only, with plans to host that night through the 2024 election.
“The Daily Show” had been planned to be live from Milwaukee, where the Republican National Convention is being held, but stepped-up security following the attempted assassination of the former president meant there was no possibility of a live audience, Stewart said. Instead, it was moved to New York and there was no show Monday.
Stewart and O’Reilly showed much of the same somewhat friendly back-and-forth Tuesday as they did in 2014.
After O’Reilly, who has written books about the assassinations of presidents, said that all of the assassins or would-be assassins in American history have been mentally ill, Stewart brought up President Abraham Lincoln’s killer John Wilkes Booth.
“Well, John Wilkes Booth was a fanatical conservative and racist who hated Lincoln,” O’Reilly began.
“Good thing that’s gone out of the country,” Stewart joked, in one of the bigger laughs from the crowd in the interview.
Stewart opened Tuesday’s show by mocking conspiratorial takes on X in the wake of the shooting. But in a serious moment, he admitted to searching social media after shocking acts of public violence, in part for personal and political reasons.
“It’s this pattern I feel like we now have in the country when we hear about a horrific event. You’re on pins and needles in this sort of reverse demographic lottery to make sure that the psychopathic shooter doesn’t belong to one of your teams,” Stewart said.
“And we’re all doing it. We’re all doing it,” he said. “Because we have to know what our posture will be on the tragedy: Will it be a haughty ‘I told you,’ or perhaps a circumspect, ‘Oh, let’s not rush to judgment. We shouldn’t generalize.’”
“And then it ends up being someone we can’t even f—— figure out in the first place,” he said.
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