Seth Meyers took a brutal swipe at Donald Trump as he said the president has ‘really lost his step’ in his feud with Gavin Newsom. The talk show host used his Wednesday night monologue to lay into Trump’s handling of the Los Angeles riots, saying he is fighting with Newsom because he ‘misses’ his breakup with Elon Musk.

‘As humiliating as it must have been for Trump to be so publicly insulted in such a high profile spat with his biggest financial backer, a guy who dresses like Nosferatu is he was a Miami club promoter,’ Meyers said. As he branded Trump’s deployment of the National Guard and Marines to the riots as ‘illegal’, Meyers said Trump has not been at his best when squaring off with the California governor.

He pointed to Trump’s threats to arrest Newsom on charges of ‘running for governor because he’s done such a bad job’ as a lackluster insult for a president known for his insults. ‘I gotta say, Trump’s really lost this step. He can’t even come up with a phony reason to arrest Newsom?’ Meyers said. ‘I mean, I could come up with a reason to arrest Newsom if I had to! ‘If you could arrest someone for being bad at their job, the jails would be filled with former head coaches of the New York Jets.’

Meyers said that the ‘fashion police’ could put Newsom in cuffs ‘for riding a skateboard in a suit.’ ‘Come on dude, you look like the CEO of a tech startup that goes bust in six months,’ he quipped. The comedian and frequent Trump critic then turned his monologue on the White House ‘Border Czar’ Tom Homan, as he played a clip of Homan saying his remarks about arresting Newsom were ‘taken out of context.’ Homan said that he never pushed to arrest the governor, but clarified that ‘if’ he broke the law then he would do so.

Meyers responded to the clip: ‘Was your message unclear because it was taken out of context, or because you sound like you have a mouthful of hot peanuts? But this is not an idle threat,’ he added. ‘The Trump regime has already arrested or indicted a sitting member of Congress, a judge, a mayor, a prominent union leader – and now Trump’s threatening to crack down on anyone who disrupts his special military birthday parade.’

As he showed clips of Trump vowing to meet any protesters with ‘heavy force’, Meyers added: ‘Wow, the guy really knows how to sell a parade, sounds like a fun time.’ The jokes about Trump’s military parade, which Meyers said is ‘ridiculous’, came before forecasters warned the entire event may have to be called off as a severe thunderstorm threatens to hit Washington DC at the weekend.

The host concluded his barbs aimed at Trump by showing a clip of Gavin Newsom’s warning earlier in the week that ‘Democracy is under assault’ and that the ‘Founding Fathers didn’t live and die to see this kind of moment.’ ‘I’m no history expert, but that seems like a pretty fair assessment to me,’ Meyers said. ‘If the Founding Fathers saw masked agents abducting people off the streets and a president sending federal troops to an American city, their wooden teeth would have fallen out of their heads.’