Where’s the Donald?
Trump trolls Trudeau after CBC cuts U.S. president’s Home Alone 2 cameo
Eagle-eyed viewers are taking the CBC to task after it emerged that the broadcaster’s recent screening of Home Alone 2: Lost in New York was missing one significant cameo: that of Donald J. Trump.
Hours after Twitter blew up over the CBC’s controversial removal of Trump’s appearance, the president of the United States threw in his two cents. “I guess Justin T doesn’t much like my making him pay up on NATO or Trade!” the U.S. president said of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Three minutes later, he retweeted another article reporting the movie edit and said, “The movie will never be the same! (just kidding).”
In the 1992 hit film Trump can be seen, briefly, passing Kevin McCallister, the character played by Macaulay Culkin. The scene, in which Kevin asks Trump how to get to the lobby, was filmed at New
York’s Plaza Hotel.
Trump has always liked the cameo in one of Christmas’s most-loved films, and told a media conference call just this week, according to Deadline:
“Well I’m in Home Alone
2. A lot of people mention it every year, especially around Christmas. They say — especially young kids — they say, ‘I just saw you on the movie.’ They don’t see me on television as they do in the movie. But it’s been a good movie and I was a little younger, to put it mildly. And it was an honour to do it.”
“And it turned out to be a very big hit, obviously. It’s a big Christmas hit — one of the biggest. So it’s an honour to be involved in something like that, you always like to see success.”
However, if you tuned into CBC’s latest broadcast in search of Trump’s proud moment, you were out of luck. That’s because the broadcaster cut several scenes out, for time purposes, back in 2014 — long before Trump became President Trump.
“As is often the case with feature films adapted for television, Home Alone 2 was edited for time,” CBC said in a statement, responding to viewer concerns.
“The scene with Donald Trump was one of several that were cut from the movie as none of them were integral to the plot. These edits were done in 2014, when we first acquired the film and before Mr. Trump was elected president.”
In total, the CBC has said that eight minutes were cut from the movie.
That explanation hasn’t stopped Twitter from having a meltdown, though. Various characters of all political persuasions have weighed in on the crisis — some loving Trump’s removal, some seeing sinister forces at play.
One user tweeted, with a reference to Trump’s recent labelling of Trudeau as twofaced: “Canadian government funded TV channel is so triggered that they cut (Trump’s) Cameo from Home Alone 2 while airing it over Christmas. I bet ‘two faced’ Trudeau made the call directly (to CBC) and demanded they cut the scene.. Or maybe just black it out #DefundCBC.”
Ryan Fournier of the group Students for Trump let fly:
“CBC TV in Canada has cut Donald Trump’s Home Alone 2 cameo out of their broadcast. They’re so triggered by him that they had to edit him out of the film. Absolutely pathetic.”
Another user, George Conway, husband of Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, was a big fan of the edit. The lawyer has been a vociferous critic of Trump, despite his wife’s role.
“You see, Senators? It’s not that hard,” he tweeted, linking Trump’s “removal” from the film to the ongoing impeachment proceedings that could see Trump removed from office, in the unlikely event that the U.S. Senate votes to do so.