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Fox Business has canceled “Lou Dobbs Tonight,” the weekday show hosted by one of former President Donald J. Trump’s most loyal media supporters that became a frequent clearinghouse for baseless theories of electoral fraud in the weeks after Mr. Trump lost the 2020 presidential race.

The end of Mr. Dobbs’s decade-long tenure as an afternoon mainstay of the network came a day after a defamation lawsuit was filed by the election technology company Smartmatic against Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Corporation and Fox News. The suit, which seeks damages of at least $2.7 billion, named Mr. Dobbs as an individual defendant, along with two other Fox anchors, Maria Bartiromo and Jeanine Pirro.

Mr. Dobbs, 75, who rose to fame as a CNN anchor, began hosting his Fox program in 2011 and gained an influential fan: Mr. Trump, who shared his hard-line views against immigration and later came to see Mr. Dobbs’s program as required viewing, even patching in the television host during policy discussions with his White House staff.

Mr. Trump, who was barred from Twitter, has been circumspect since leaving the White House in what subjects he comments on. But roughly an hour after the news broke of Mr. Dobbs’s departure, the former president issued a comment to The New York Times about the anchor.

“Lou Dobbs is and was great,” Mr. Trump said in a statement. “Nobody loves America more than Lou. He had a large and loyal following that will be watching closely for his next move, and that following includes me.”

Fox News did not elaborate on why it had decided to abruptly cancel Mr. Dobbs’s program. But the network said in a statement on Friday that it regularly reviews its programming lineup.

“Plans have been in place to launch new formats as appropriate postelection, including on Fox Business,” the network said. “This is part of those planned changes. A new 5 p.m. program will be announced in the near future.”

For now, a rotating group of hosts will replace Mr. Dobbs in his 5 p.m. time slot. The anchors Jackie DeAngelis and David Asman will sit in for Mr. Dobbs next week. “Lou Dobbs Tonight” had also been repeated at 7 p.m.

The lawsuit that names Mr. Dobbs cited a false claim, made on a November episode of Mr. Dobbs’s show on Fox Business, that Hugo Chávez, the deceased president of Venezuela, had a hand in the creation of Smartmatic technology, designing it so that the votes it processed could be changed undetected. (Mr. Chávez, who died in 2013, did not have anything to do with Smartmatic.)

The Chávez claim was made by Sidney Powell, who worked as a lawyer for Mr. Trump. She was also sued by Smartmatic on Thursday, along with another Trump lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani. Mr. Dobbs was also cited in the lawsuit for using the phrase “cyber Pearl Harbor” to describe a supposed vote-fraud conspiracy, borrowing language used by Ms. Powell.

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