Orwellian dehumanization or saving 7 seconds for extra commercials? What’s behind Trump-less ‘Home Alone 2’ cut

Before he was US president, Donald Trump had a notable cameo in ‘Home Alone 2: Lost in New York.’ You won’t know that if you watch the Christmas movie in Canada, as the CBC removed it – to make time for commercials, they say.

The John Hughes comedy follows the misadventures of Kevin (Macauley Culkin) as he ends up in New York City while his family goes from Chicago to Florida. In one scene, Kevin is gawking at the glitzy Plaza Hotel and asks Trump for directions – which the real-estate mogul helpfully and politely provides.

Those who watch the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s TV cut of the 1992 classic, however, will never see the scene. Nor will those who rely on the BBC America version, apparently.

Many Trump supporters called foul on CBC, some going so far as to accuse the Canadian state broadcaster of suffering from “Trump Derangement Syndrome” and making the edit for political reasons.

“Make no mistake, they sanitized the Trump scene out of Home Alone because it does the most dangerous thing of all: It humanizes him,”argued OAN journalist Jack Posobiec.

According to the CBC, however, the cut is neither recent, nor political. The cameo was among the scenes removed to make time for commercials in 2014, long before Trump was a political figure, the network said.

There are in fact complaints about the missing cameo going back to 2015, suggesting that the CBC’s timeline is correct. As to the motive, critics have pointed out that the Trump cameo is a whole seven seconds long, and that removing it achieves nothing.

Meanwhile, Canadian liberals and the anti-Trump ‘Resistance’ in the US applauded the CBC, dismissing the complaints as coming from “magats and Russian bots,” and wishing it was that easy “editing Trump out of the White House.”

Even the US President himself eventually weighted in on the 'controversy', joking that it might've been a personal initiative of the Canadian leader – and that the movie “will never be the same!”

Earlier Trump brought up his ‘Home Alone’ appearance as getting him a lot of positive mentions from people, especially children, who watch it around Christmastime. “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 said on Wednesday, in a conference call with members of the US military deployed overseas.

Before taking the plunge into American politics in 2015, Trump had been best-known for his reality TV show ‘The Apprentice’ and a real-estate empire he had built – and rebuilt – in the decades prior. He has made dozens of cameo appearances in TV shows, including “Sex and the City” and “Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” to name but a few, as well as movies such as “Zoolander” and “Two Weeks Notice.”

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