Donald Trump’s cameo is cut from a Canadian broadcast of Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, after the president said it was an honor to appear in the film. Long before he was elected to the highest office in the land, and even before The Apprentice, Trump was known as a businessman that enjoyed the spotlight. He appeared in everything from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air to Sex and the City to the Sandra Bullock romantic comedy, Two Weeks Notice. In the case of Home Alone 2, Trump pops up when Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin) asks him for directions. The scene is brief, as cameos tend to be, but it meant enough to Trump that he recently praised the holiday movie in a conference call with American troops.
In an interview, back in 2017, Matt Damon gave some insight as to how the cameo actually happened. The actor explained that in exchange for allowing productions to shoot on his properties, as Home Alone 2 does, Trump would ask for a role to be written for him. Damon further elaborated that this was the case with Scent of a Woman as well. Although the businessman was ultimately left on the editing room floor, the cameo would have originally featured Trump appearing in the same scene as Al Pacino. Discussing the incident with Chris O’Donnell, who actually does appear in Scent of a Woman, Conan O’Brien joked that there must be dozens of random Trump cameos which were filmed with no intention of being included in the final cut.
We now know, definitively, of another instance in which Trump was edited out. As noted by ComicBook, Trump’s scene with a young Macaulay Culkin was removed from CBC TV’s recent airing of Home Alone 2. The omission did not go unnoticed on Twitter, with some praising the decision and others being quite angry about it.
CBC, which is the original home of Schitt’s Creek, spoke out against the assumption that Trump’s removal was politically-motivated. The network pointed out that movies, when adapted for television, are often edited to allow for more commercial time. Trump’s scene is one such example, according to CBC, sacrificed so that more advertisements could be squeezed in.
It is true that even iconic films, like Jackie Brown and The Matrix, have been chopped up for TV. It is also true that Trump has a much larger platform now than when he was left out of an Al Pacino movie, with any bizarre story involving the President taking on a life of its own. While he’s yet to comment on CBC’s editing choices for Home Alone 2, it’s possible Trump has found a new target of ire for his stump speeches and frequent tweets.
Source: ComicBook