Jon Stewart welcomes Bill O’Reilly back to Daily Show to reveal moment Trump is still ‘haunted’ by

Jon Stewart returned to The Daily Show on Tuesday to spar once more with former Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly, who made the surprising argument that Donald Trump is “haunted” by the legacy of January 6, without which he might have been able to pull much further ahead of Joe Biden in the polls.

The Comedy Central satire had been due to broadcast from the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin this week, but its producers had to cancel Monday’s instalment and return to New York when security arrangements were ramped up following the assassination attempt on Trump at his Pennsylvania rally over the weekend.

Stewart opened by paying tribute to his production crew for hastily reorganizing before introducing O’Reilly, a regular foil from the show’s pre-2015 heyday, to discuss the heated nature of so much current political rhetoric, polarization, fanaticism, and what historic attacks on American presidents have had in common.

The pair were soon back to bickering, with Stewart invoking the Capitol riot of January 6, 2021 when a violent mob of Trump’s supporters stormed the legislative complex in Washington DC to prevent the formal certification of the previous November’s election results, fired up by his baseless insistence that the vote was “stolen” and his urging them to “fight like hell” moments before they acted.

“That has haunted him every day since,” O’Reilly contended, to which the host responded by scoffing: “Oh, he’s paid a terrible price…”

O’Reilly persisted: “If Trump hadn’t done that on January 6, he’d be ahead of Joe Biden by 25 points in the polls. That’s how bad Biden has been for the country.”

The conservative broadcaster then produced a sheet of A4 paper from his jacket containing a laundry list