A director’s decades-long lament of a personal “curse” involving a widely-cheered pre-presidential cameo demonstrated the confounding “brain rot that accompanies Leftism.”
While many media figures have seemingly volunteered themselves as living case studies for the detrimental impact of Trump Derangement Syndrome, few could attest to having maintained their symptoms as long as filmmaker Chris Columbus.
Known for directing the first two Harry Potter films, “Mrs. Doubtfire” and many more popular films since the 80s, Columbus perhaps remained best known for Macauley Culkin’s “Home Alone” films, for which his supposedly unwavering regret over including then-businessman Donald Trump continued.
In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, the director of 1992’s “Home Alone 2: Lost in New York” claimed that the popular appearance of the real estate mogul giving Culkin’s Kevin McCallister directions in New York City’s Plaza Hotel was something he would have cut if not for the reception during early screenings.
“Years later, it’s become this curse. It’s become this thing that I wish it was not there,” he told the newspaper. “But it’s [the cameo] there. It’s become an albatross for me. I just wish it was gone.”
Home Alone 2!
Donald Trump Truth Social 02:45 PM EST 12/25/23 pic.twitter.com/g4xMhnHesK
— Donald J. Trump Posts From His Truth Social (@TrumpDailyPosts) December 26, 2023
By the director’s own account, audiences loved the cameo: “We screened the film in Chicago, and when that moment came onscreen, the audience went crazy. They cheered and they cheered and they thought it was hilarious. I think I know a lot about comedy, but I don’t, obviously, because I never thought that was going to be considered hilarious.”
While certain airings of the film, like the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 2019, had opted to cut the scene from broadcast, the Pennsylvania-born filmmaker leaned into leftist hyperbole about President Donald Trump by suggesting he would be expelled from the country if he tried to remove the cameo now.
“I can’t cut it. If I cut it, I’ll probably be sent out of the country. 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 told the Chronicle.
Much like Trump’s lasting appearance in the Plaza for “Home Alone 2,” the GOP leader occupied space rent-free in the director’s mind as he previously contended in 2020 that Trump had leveraged use of the hotel he owned at the time to get the cameo, telling Business Insider, “But he did bully his way into the movie.”
The president refuted that claim in 2023, stating that Columbus “and others were begging me to make a cameo appearance in Home Alone 2.”
“What’s going through this guy’s mind? He said I was lying. I’m not lying. He said I begged him to be in the movie, but there’s no world I would ever beg a non-actor to be in a movie,” the director insisted to the Chronicle before noting, “But we were desperate to get the Plaza Hotel.”
The extent to which Columbus was bothered by Trump’s appearance in his film more than 30 years later, even in spite of audience reactions, had many calling out the confounding mental state of TDS sufferers.
As one social media user put it, “I will never understand the brain rot that accompanies Leftism.”
“People cheered when Trump showed up on screen, but I have nothing but contempt and disdain for the sort of people who watch my movies, so why should I put things in a film that the audience likes?”
* I will never understand the brain rot that accompanies Leftism
— Cruadin (@cruadin) April 15, 2025
A curse? Really? There are real problems in the world and this ain’t one.
— Alex Treviño (@alextrev83) April 15, 2025
Liberals are so triggered
— Ny MaGee (@indieartswag) April 15, 2025
Give me a break. He could have gone with any other hotel if he felt bullied by Trump. In 1992 this was just a funny cameo where a lost kid doesn’t realize he’s talking to a famous rich businessman.
— Bookshelf Q. Battler (@bookshelfbattle) April 15, 2025
None of these brave Hollyweird activists have ever wanted to remove the various pedophiles who have been in their movie though.
— Infidel (@Oreallynow1) April 15, 2025
TDS is weird.
— Kris Ashton (@wordsmanship) April 15, 2025
Over 30 years later and Chris Columbus is ‘upset’ over this cameo? Dude is either desperate for some relevance or needs to get a life and let it go.
— DriverJsGarage (@DriverJsGarage) April 15, 2025
People loved him in the movie at the time, and they still do today. The director needs to get over himself, and check his TDS at the door.
— Gabriel Mican (@youwishmusic) April 15, 2025
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