'Twas the night after Christmas, and the president of the United States was suggesting on Twitter that the prime minister of Canada ordered the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. to edit out his brief cameo in Home Alone 2. In fact, Trump's 7-second scene in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York was absent from the CBC's December broadcasts of the 1992 film. But Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau played no role, and the CBC say the edits were made in 2014, when the prime minister was Stephen Harper, a Conservative.
USA Today characterized that tweet as Trump appearing "to tease" Trudeau, and Trump later tweeted a more overt joke in response to another article about the CBC's edits: "The movie will never be the same! (just kidding)." But his son Donald Trump Jr. took serious umbrage at his father's cameo being excised, and it wasn't a joke on Thursday's Fox & Friends.
It's "very possible" Trump was "joking with his suggestion that Trudeau had a hand in deleting him from a children's film," says CNN's Daniel Dale, who is Canadian. "But since others are taking this matter quite seriously, we're going to set the record straight." The CBC said it cut eight minutes from Home Alone 2 "when we first acquired the film" in 2014, and "the scene with Donald Trump was one of several that were cut from the movie as none of them were integral to the plot."
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Dale confirmed that people have been tweeting about Trump's scene being cut as early as 2015. And not just Trump's cameo, he added: "Since 2014, people have scolded CBC for failing to air such Home Alone 2 scenes as 'Kevin going swimming,' 'THE TURTLE DOVE EXCHANGE,' and a scene in which a homeless man warns Macaulay Culkin's protagonist, Kevin McCallister, to 'Watch it, kid.'"
Trudeau's office declined CNN's request for comment.
