Director Says Trump Cameo in ‘Home Alone 2’ Is an Embarrassment — But He’s “Afraid” to Cut It

Chris Columbus blasts Trump’s forced appearance: “It’s an albatross. I just want it gone.”

Three decades after Home Alone 2: Lost in New York hit theaters, director Chris Columbus is still haunted by the film’s now-infamous cameo — not from a movie villain, but from Donald J. Trump.

In a revealing new interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, the celebrated director of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and Mrs. Doubtfire said he wants Trump erased from the 1992 holiday classic. But he fears political blowback if he dares to make the cut.

“If I cut it, I’ll probably be sent out of the country,” Columbus joked, taking aim at the former president’s long history of xenophobic rhetoric and threats of mass deportation. “I’ll be considered sort of not fit to live in the United States, so I’ll have to go back to Italy or something.”

Columbus, a Pennsylvania native with Italian roots, says the seven-second cameo wasn’t part of the original creative plan — it was a power move by Trump himself.

“We paid to film at the Plaza,” Columbus recalled. “But Trump said the only way we could use it was if he was in the movie. He bullied his way in.”

That brief interaction between Trump and young Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin) — asking for directions in the hotel lobby — has since become one of the most polarizing moments in family movie history.

What once drew applause from audiences has now become, in Columbus’s words, “an albatross.”

“It’s become this curse,” he said. “I just wish it was gone.”

The backlash isn’t new. After Trump’s presidency, fans began calling for his removal. In 2021, Culkin himself endorsed a fan petition to digitally erase Trump from the movie. “Sold,” he replied to a tweet suggesting he be edited into the scene as his present-day self.

And when a fan shared a version of the film with Trump scrubbed out entirely, Culkin responded with a simple: “Bravo.”

Trump, unsurprisingly, offered his own spin. In a 2023 post on Truth Social, he claimed Columbus had begged him to be in the movie.

“They were very nice, but above all, persistent,” Trump wrote. “I agreed, and the rest is history!”

He dismissed Columbus’s account as “just another Hollywood guy from the past looking for a quick fix of Trump publicity.”

But the facts suggest otherwise. Trump’s demand to appear in any film shot at his properties was well known in the ‘80s and ‘90s — a self-promotional tactic that now feels far more sinister in hindsight.

Today, Columbus says the Trump cameo feels like a stain on his career — one he’d gladly remove, if only the cultural climate didn’t make doing so so fraught.

For millions of Americans who endured four years of Trump’s chaos, the scene hits differently now — a reminder of how the man who once photobombed Christmas movies went on to derail democracy itself.

As for Columbus? He’s not alone. More filmmakers are reevaluating what once seemed like harmless cameos from a man who later tried to overturn an election and incited a deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol.

The director’s message is clear: Trump didn’t just hijack the Plaza Hotel — he hijacked the movie. And 30 years later, that moment feels less like a funny footnote and more like a regrettable legacy.