U.S. President Donald Trump, who tweeted about the financial success of Home Alone 2: Lost in New York earlier this holiday season, joking (one assumes) that it was a feather in his cap, lashed out on Twitter today after a story broke last night that his cameo in the film had been cut from broadcast by Canadian network CBC. An explanation that the cut was innocuous and made years before Trump won the presidency in 2016 was not enough to satisfy the Trump family; first Donald Trump, Jr. took to Twitter to air grievances, and now the President himself has done the same.
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ComicBook.com first reported about the edit yesterday, and it has sparked a flurry of responses. Trump supporters and detractors alike assumed it to be a political move, but it was later revealed that it was a sequence the CBC had cut several years ago in order to save time and maximize advertising revenue. The broadcaster claims the move had nothing to do with Trump’s politics but was strategic: the scene was cut because losing it would not hurt the movie.
“I guess [Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau] doesn’t much like my making him pay up on NATO or Trade!” Trump tweeted. He shared a story that called the edit “censorship” and tweeted, “The movie will never be the same! (just kidding)”
Earlier today we noted that for a brief time, the entry referred to Trump as “the first cast member of Home Alone 2: Lost in New York to be impeached by the U.S. House of Representatives.” While this is technically true, there are probably no other Home Alone 2 cast members who have jobs which would make impeachment by the House a viable life event.
In the film, Trump plays himself, passing through the hotel where Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin) is staying while in New York. Kevin stops him to ask a question, Trump answers it, and the pair move past one another. The scene does little to advance the plot, but was reportedly included because Trump used to ask for a cameo in film and TV productions who wanted to use properties he owned onscreen.
“The deal was that if you wanted to shoot in one of his buildings, you had to write him in a part,” Matt Damond explained in a 2017 interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “You waste a little time so that you can get the permit, and then you can cut the scene out. But I guess in Home Alone 2 they left it in.”
As part of a wealthy family and someone who courted media attention from a young age, Trump’s celebrity made minor cameos seem obvious in the ’80s and ’90s, with or without an official deal between the production companies and Trump’s. Besides Home Alone 2, the future President appeared in The Little Rascals, Suddenly Susan, The Nanny, Spin City, and Zoolander (among others) before landing his own gig as the host of the NBC reality serires The Apprentice and its spinoffs.
