Fox News host Bill O'Reilly told Jon Stewart that the only reason Donald Trump isn't trouncing Joe Biden in the polls is because of the ex-president's role in the Jan. 6 riots.
O'Reilly, who now hosts a show on his own platform, returned to The Daily Show for the first time since Stewart departed in 2015 and since Fox fired O'Reilly in 2017 over mounting sexual harassment claims.
Beyond causing outrage among his liberal audience, Stewart himself had once critiqued the show's use of O'Reilly as the Comedy Central program's 'worst legacy' because it meant the audience was expecting the comic to 'destroy him'.
That legacy clearly weighed on Stewart during the interview, as he tried to reframe his conversations with O'Reilly as people who simply wanted to reasonably disagree.
However, O'Reilly revealed his thoughts on the upcoming election, with the self-described 'independent' saying there's only one thing keeping Donald Trump from beating Joe Biden by 25 points.
The commentator, who has been friendly with Trump over the years, says that Trump's reaction to January 6 'has haunted him every day since'.
Stewart disagreed and continued to push his question, wondering if opposing political factions could ever really tone things down given extreme beliefs like what led to January 6.
O'Reilly retorted: 'If Trump hadn't done that on January 6th, he'd be ahead of 25 points in the poll. That's how Biden has been for the country.'
Stewart and O'Reilly then argued over Biden's record, with O'Reilly citing inflation as a key negative of Biden's tenure.
Earlier in the conversation, O'Reilly tried to denote a difference between his battles with Stewart over the years and the modern extremes of both parties today.
'We have made a nice living confronting people. We don't want to see them destroyed, that's the difference,' he said.
'The fanatics on the left and the right want to see their opposition destroyed, they want to hurt them.'
When Stewart was asked by the New York Times about O'Reilly in 2020, he seemed to regret the pressure put on him to cause such destruction.
'The question was always, Why would you talk to him? Why do you have him on the show if you can't destroy him? If you want to talk about the worst legacy of 'The Daily Show,' it was probably that.'
O'Reilly appeared on Stewart's show 15 times during its original era, with the show's spinoff 'The Colbert Report' engaging in a direct parody of the commentator.
The duo even got together for a pay-per-view debate in 2012, called The Rumble in the Air-Conditioned Auditorium, with proceeds going to charity.
Stewart did take a bunch of shots at Republicans earlier on in the show, which was originally scheduled to be in Milwaukee near the convention before the attempted assassination of Donald Trump.
He mocked Republicans for going against their calls for unity in the wake of the shooting.
On Marjorie Taylor Greene's speech: 'Her body rejected the unity theme, as though it were transplanted like a monkey heart.'
He then mocked model Amber Rose, who said that Republicans didn't care if 'you're straight or gay, it's all love.'
Stewart snarked: 'It's love! It's all love! You just better hope that love doesn't lead to an ectopic pregnancy!'
The comic then took aim at vice presidential nominee, saying he eerily resembled Trump's eldest son.
'It's like for VP, Donald selected the actor who would be hired to play Don Jr. in the Lifetime movie. It's not right! It's like Don Jr. was the Beta version that had to have the kinks worked out,' he joked.
When it came to the shooting, Stewart bemoaned the misinformation and speed of social media which led everyone following along 'making sure the psychopathic shooter doesn't belong to [our] teams.'
He ultimately described 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks as 'someone we can't even f***ing figure out in the first place,' while praising hero firefighter Corey Comperatore.
'I don't know what's going on with this guy,' he said. 'It's a jump ball, we don't know yet. None of us knows what's gonna happen next... other than there will be another tragedy that happens to us, by us.'
