Two days after he joked with U.S. service members about his short cameo in “Home Alone 2,” President Trump blamed Canada’s prime minister for his scene being cut out of a Canadian broadcast of the film this week.
Mr. Trump, amid a flurry of retweets Thursday evening, commented on stories by a Florida Fox affiliate and by Mediaite about the social-media hubbub over the screening this week by the state-owned Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
Perhaps with his tongue in his cheek, Mr. Trump blamed Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, with whom he has frequently clashed and in unusually personal terms on such matters as tariffs and defense spending.
“I guess Justin T doesn’t much like my making him pay up on NATO or Trade!” he wrote on Twitter.
A few minutes later, in a separate retweet, he lamented that “the movie will never be the same!” Then added “(just kidding).”
The CBC said Thursday that it had made numerous other trims to the movie — a common practice for TV screenings, to fit time slots — and that it had done so years ago and without political motivation.
“These edits were done in 2014 when we first acquired the film and before Mr. Trump was elected president,” a CBC spokesperson said.
At the time, Mr. Trump was not even a candidate for president, though he had become widely disliked among liberals for pushing the “birther” theory that President Barack Obama was not born in the U.S.
“Home Alone 2” already had been part of this week’s news cycle for Mr. Trump as U.S. service member asked him in a Christmas Eve video call whether “Home Alone 2” was his favorite movie.
“Well, I’m in ’Home Alone 2,’” the president said to laughter on the video call. “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 bit younger, to put it mildly. And it was an honor to do it.”
He noted that the film was “a big Christmas hit — one of the biggest.”
Mr. Trump’s several-second cameo, which is not dramatically essential, involves Kevin, played by Macaulay Culkin, wandering into the Plaza Hotel looking for his family and asking a stranger, “where’s the lobby?”
“Down the hall and to the left,” Mr. Trump responds.
• S.A. Miller contributed to this report.
• Victor Morton can be reached at vmorton@washingtontimes.com.
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