Chris Columbus is scared that if he cuts Donald Trump out of Home Alone 2, he’ll get deported. At first glance, that sounds like the kind of nervous Hollywood joke you’d toss out on a late-night panel. But in 2025? With Trump freshly re-elected, threatening to ship American citizens off to El Salvadoran mega-prisons, and sending Mel Gibson to Hollywood as a morality cop? It starts sounding a lot less like a punchline and a lot more like… well, something you say when you’re genuinely worried about being on a list.
Columbus told the San Francisco Chronicle that the infamous Trump cameo, a blink-and-you-miss-it walk-on in the Plaza Hotel, has become an albatross. A seven-second curse. The scene only exists because Trump, who owned the Plaza at the time, made it a condition of filming there. Columbus never wanted him in the final cut, but test audiences reacted positively, and boom — Trump was canonized in holiday movie history, right next to Buzz’s tarantula and the Talkboy.
But fast-forward thirty years, and now Columbus is visibly anxious about touching the footage. “If I cut it,” he said, “I’ll probably be sent out of the country.” It’s a half-joke, but in this political climate, it lands with a thud. Because let’s be honest — Trump’s been on a bit of a revenge tour since getting back into office three months ago, and if there’s one thing we know about him, it’s that he never lets go of a grudge.
Need proof? Look no further than his recent sit-down with El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, where Trump casually floated the idea of outsourcing violent American criminals to El Salvador’s massive Terrorism Confinement Center (aka the CECOT superprison). His pitch was simple: the U.S. should send subway pushers and senior citizen assaulters — his words — to Bukele’s dystopian megaplex. “If it were legal,” Trump said, “I’d do it in a heartbeat.” He even joked(?) that Bukele would need to build “five more” of the things.
So yeah — Columbus’s fears, while dramatic, aren’t exactly unfounded. It doesn’t take a conspiracy theorist to imagine a world where a thin-skinned former president-turned-current president lashes out at a filmmaker for cutting him out of a Christmas movie. This is the guy who rage-tweeted about The Apprentice ratings while president, after all. And now he has executive authority again, a bone to pick, and a new habit of assigning action heroes to fix the culture war.
Because let’s not forget: Trump just appointed John Voight, Mel Gibson, and Sylvester Stallone as his unofficial Hollywood “watchdogs.” That’s not satire. That’s actual policy now. Gibson, the same guy who once blamed all the world’s problems on—you know what, never mind. The point is, if Columbus is sweating under the collar, it’s not because he’s being dramatic. It’s because the political climate has gone full Idiocracy, and he’s worried he’ll be made an example of for finally doing what millions of us have dreamed about since 2016: pressing the delete key on that smug little “down the hall and to the left” cameo.
And yet, here’s the thing: the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation already removed Trump from their airings of Home Alone 2 — back in 2014. A full two years before the world caught on fire. They did it as part of routine broadcast trimming to fit the movie into its time slot. No drama. No outrage. Just a snip-snip and back to the wet bandits. Of course, once Trump became president, the edit was dragged back into the spotlight and suddenly it was the wokest cut ever made, according to Twitter. Even though it predates any of this nonsense.
Macaulay Culkin, for his part, is all for deleting Trump. When a fan suggested replacing the cameo with a CGI version of a 40-year-old Kevin McCallister — like some bizarre Christmas time loop — Culkin gave it a thumbs up. Honestly? That version of the movie would slap. Kevin McCallister, older and wiser, warning his younger self not to trust strange men in lobbies. “He’s gonna run for president, kid. Don’t talk to him.”
But we shouldn’t kid ourselves. This isn’t just about a cameo in a ‘90s movie. This is about what it means to live in a country where cutting seven seconds of footage can trigger real fear. We live in a political moment where even the pettiest cultural slight might result in you getting thrown under the bus — or into a Bukele prison, if that fever dream becomes real policy.
Columbus’s joke lands because it’s not just a joke. It’s a nervous laugh in the face of escalating absurdity. And the rest of us are right there with him, trying to figure out how we got here, where editing a Christmas movie feels like an act of political defiance, and a Hollywood director has to wonder if he’ll be targeted for finally doing what test audiences wouldn’t let him do 30 years ago.
We used to argue about who shot first. Now we’re arguing about whether removing a cameo might get you thrown in an overseas supermax run by a guy who once livestreamed prisoners getting hosed down in chains. What a time to be alive.
Happy Holidays.
Hollywood After Dark 