“Home Alone” director Chris Columbus said in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle that he wishes he could remove Donald Trump‘s cameo from the 1992 sequel, “Home Alone 2: Lost in New York.” The filmmaker said Trump’s seven-second appearance in the movie has “become this curse. It’s become an albatross for me. I just wish it was gone.”

“I can’t cut it,” Columbus added on a sarcastic note. “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.”

“Home Alone 2” finds Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin) accidentally boarding a flight to New York instead of Miami, where his family is going for Christmas vacation. Lost in the Big Apple, Kevin stumbles into the Plaza Hotel and briefly meets Trump, who he asks for directions. Trump owned the Plaza Hotel at the time. Columbus told Business Insider in 2020 that Trump more or less “bullied his way into the movie.”

“We paid the fee, but he also said, ‘The only way you can use the Plaza is if I’m in the movie’,” Columbus said. “So we agreed to put him in the movie, and when we screened it for the first time the oddest thing happened: People cheered when Trump showed up on screen. So I said to my editor, ‘Leave him in the movie. It’s a moment for the audience.’”

That decision would go on to haunt Columbus years later when Trump became president. Fans of the movie have called for Trump’s removal over the years, with Culkin going viral for backing an online campaign to get Trump out of the film. Responding to a tweet from a fan that read “Petition to digitally replace Trump in ‘Home Alone 2’ with 40-year-old Macaulay Culkin,” the actor wrote: “Sold.”

Amid the calls to remove him from the movie, Trump wrote on Truth Social in 2023 that Columbus was “begging” him to appear in “Home Alone 2.”

“I was very busy, and didn’t want to do it,” Trump wrote. “They were very nice, but above all, persistent. I agreed, and the rest is history! That little cameo took off like a rocket, and the movie was a big success, and still is, especially around Christmas time. People call me whenever it is aired. Now, however, 30 years later, Columbus (what was his real name?) put out a statement that I bullied myself into the movie. Nothing could be further from the truth. That cameo helped make the movie a success … Just another Hollywood guy from the past looking for a quick fix of Trump publicity for himself!”