Bill O’Reilly Returns to Train With Jon Stewart on ‘The Daily Show’ After a Decade

A decade after the two hosts last faced off on air, “Daily Show” host Jon Stewart and former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly reunited Tuesday and continued the debate — though by today’s extremes, they were more friends than foes.

O’Reilly acknowledged from the start that the couple “had history.”

“If you Google Stewart and I, we can disagree without hating each other. I really hate him, but I don’t show it,” O’Reilly joked.

“But you’re holding it very well,” Stewart said.

There was only one topic of discussion Tuesday: the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump, the motive for which is still unknown.

O’Reilly called for calm, criticizing some, including a TV talk show host, for what he said was emphasizing that the alleged shooter was a registered Republican, to which Stewart fired back.

“You and I are both somewhat fossilized practitioners of rhetorical arts that are sometimes confrontational, sometimes provocative,” Stewart said. “And we’ve made a really spectacular living pushing those boundaries.”

Stewart and O’Reilly have a history of on-air conflict, reflecting two opposing viewpoints, with O’Reilly being Stewart’s conservative counterpart, and vice versa.

O’Reilly last appeared on “The Daily Show” in 2014, when the two engaged in a heated discussion about race and white privilege. The duo previously participated in a 2012 charity debate called “The Rumble in the Air-Conditioned Auditorium.”

Stewart left The Daily Show in 2015. O’Reilly was fired by Fox in 2017 following allegations of sexual harassment. He has denied the accusations.

Stewart returned to “The Daily Show” this year to host the show on Mondays only, with plans to host that night through the 2024 election.

The Daily Show was scheduled to air live from Milwaukee, where the Republican National Convention is being held, but heightened security measures following the assassination attempt on the former president made it impossible to broadcast live, Stewart said. Instead, the show was moved to New York and did not air Monday.

Stewart and O’Reilly showed much of the same friendly exchanges Tuesday as in 2014.

After O’Reilly, who has written books on presidential assassinations, said that every assassin or would-be assassin in American history was mentally ill, Stewart brought up President Abraham Lincoln’s murderer, John Wilkes Booth.

“Well, John Wilkes Booth was a bigoted, racist conservative who hated Lincoln,” O’Reilly began.

“Good thing it aired overseas,” Stewart joked, drawing one of the biggest laughs from the crowd during the interview.

Stewart opened Tuesday’s show by mocking conspiracy theories about X in the wake of the shootings. But in a serious moment, he admitted to taking to social media after shocking acts of public violence, partly for personal and political reasons.

“That’s the pattern we have now in the country when we hear about a horrific event. You’re on tenterhooks in this kind of reverse demographic lottery to make sure that the psychopathic shooter is not on one of your teams,” Stewart said.

“And we all do it. We all do it,” he said. “Because we have to know what our attitude is going to be in the face of tragedy: will it be a haughty ‘I told you so’ or maybe a cautious ‘oh, let’s not rush to judgment. We shouldn’t generalize.'”

“And then it turns out it’s someone we can’t even understand in the first place,” he said.