Jimmy Kimmel’s late night show was cancelled because the host is “not talented” and he had “bad ratings”, Donald Trump has said.

The US president claimed the declining popularity of Jimmy Kimmel Live! prompted Disney’s ABC to take it off air, rather than comments the host made about the death of Charlie Kirk.

The network suspended Kimmel’s show “indefinitely” on Wednesday after Nexstar Media, one of the biggest owners of television stations in the US, said it would no longer broadcast the show on its 23 local stations.

In the opening monologue of the show on Monday, Kimmel said the “Maga gang” was trying to use Kirk’s killing to “score political points”.

Kimmel said: “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the Maga gang desperately trying to characterise this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”

He then mocked Mr Trump’s reaction to the tragedy: “This is not how an adult grieves the murder of someone he called a friend. This is how a four-year-old mourns a goldfish.”