Jon Stewart’s return this week to a late-night television landscape that has, over the past roughly nine years, largely reshaped itself in his image should have been the triumphant homecoming of a beloved liberal figure. Instead, it was met with a hailstorm of liberal rage.

Donald Trump’s niece Mary, for example — a liberal cable news celebrity since releasing her best-selling tell-all anti-Trump book in 2020 — embodied it best by declaring Stewart’s jokes “a potential disaster for democracy” given the “existential” nature of the 2024 election, before later accusing him of having caused Trump’s 2016 election win.

Stewart’s crime was daring to use his first night at the Daily Show desk in nine years to wade into the fraught subject of President Joe Biden’s age — a long-standing concern among US voters which had shot to recent salience after special counsel Robert Hur’s report on the president’s mishandling of classified documents alleged he had exhibited “significant limitations” in cognitive functioning in the course of his investigation.