Donald Trump Got More Than He Bargained For When He Offered To Pick Up A Home Alone Star's Tab
Donald Trump had a cameo in "Home Alone 2: Lost in New York," and that quick appearance may have cost him thousands of dollars. Daniel Stern played Marv Murchins, one of the bumbling burglars that terrorized Macaulay Culkin's character Kevin McCallister, and he wrote in his memoir "Home and Alone" about how he went wild at the Plaza Hotel bar after Trump had said he'd pick up the tab. He basically earned the real-life moniker of "wet bandit" — here's what Stern wrote about what happened.
Stern was at the Plaza's Oak Room enjoying drinks with his friends when Donald and his then-wife Ivana Trump came in and made the rounds in the popular, iconic bar. "Donald spotted us and proclaimed so everyone could hear that he would be picking up the tab at our table," Stern said, via Page Six. It seemed to be giving off vibes of Donald showing himself off as "the host-with-the-most."
Other than Donald's offer to pay for the drinks, Stern didn't seem too impressed with him. "He was not a great conversationalist," Stern wrote, "and kind of a nothing personality, but the meeting paid off brilliantly."
Daniel Stern bought multiple rounds for the entire bar on Trump's dime
The brilliant payoff part of that meeting was that Daniel Stern, knowing that Donald Trump would be picking up the tab, could really go for it, drinks-wise. As he put it in his book, Stern and his friends who were out with him that night knocked back drinks, "until there was no more booze left in that bar," per Page Six.
But it wasn't just Stern and his buddies who got drinks on Trump's dime. They also bought rounds for everyone at the bar, multiple times. By the end of the night — they stayed until the bar closed at 4 a.m. — the tab was, according to Stern, "at least seven thousand dollars."
That's a lot of booze! We wonder what Trump thought when he saw that bill. Granted, he was a millionaire, possibly a billionaire, at the time, so what might seem like a jaw-dropping amount to the rest of us might not seem like all that much to Trump.
Donald Trump got his Home Alone 2 cameo because he owned the Plaza Hotel
We don't know if Donald Trump actually paid that massive bar bill racked up by Daniel Stern. After all, he has had a history of offering to pick up the check and then not doing so. There have been multiple people over the years who have accused Trump of not paying them the money they're owed. However, since Trump owned the Plaza Hotel at the time "Home Alone 2: Lost in New York" was filming, it may have been just built into the operating expenses. There's no way to know, and there's not yet been a response from Trump about Stern's reveal of how he racked up a huge bar tab.
Trump owning the Plaza Hotel is why he ended up in "Home Alone 2." If the director Chris Columbus wanted to film there, they had to agree to film a scene with Trump in it. But Trump and the director have different perspectives on how the "Home Alone 2" cameo came about. Trump posted on Truth Social that director Chris Columbus and others on production "were begging me" to be in the movie. For his part, Columbus said Trump pretty much forced his way into the movie.