Haul Out the Guillotine! Was this weird Trump email meant to stoke division?

Donald Trump has divided the country ever since he exploded into politics, and the former president often uses this division when speaking to his supporters. This was exactly why a recent email from Trump to his supporters in mid-June caught the attention of American media.

It wasn't just that the message in Trump's email was stoking division to encourage more donations to his presidential campaign, but also really just because he started the email off by writing: "Haul Out the Guillotine!"

The former president—or more likely someone on his campaign team—thought it would be a good idea to evoke images of a revolution in his supporters' minds by calling for them to “Haul out the Guillotine” in a recent email but the message was a little more complicated than had been reported by some. 

Photo Credit: X @Olivianuzzi

Trump and his team weren’t calling for the heads of his political enemies but rather they were using the phrase “Haul out the Guillotine” as a pitch to remind his closest supporters that those who oppose him are the kinds of people who have previously called for his head. It pointed to one nasty incident specifically. 

“Remember when that Sicko Kathy Griffin made the rounds parading my BEHEADED head when I was President?!” the email explained, referencing the 2017 incident that saw Griffen share images holding Trump’s decapitated head according to Rolling Stone. 

Griffin had posted the controversial image to her social media and later apologized for the photos following a major backlash. “I’m a comic. I cross the line. I move the line, then I cross it. I went way too far,” Griffin wrote on Instagram, Rolling Stone reported. 

“I understand how it offends people. It wasn’t funny. I get it,” Griffin added. In addition to removing the controversial images from her social media, she asked photographer Tyler Shields to remove the photos from his social media accounts.

Shields defended the photos amidst the controversy and told the New York Daily News the images were art. “I cannot stress enough that I respect the presidency of the United States and would never want anyone to be killed. But it’s art.”

“When you make art, you can do anything you want,” Shields continued. However, the then-president didn’t share his artistic view of the images. Trump blasted Griffen online for her artistic project and called her “sick”.

“Kathy Griffin should be ashamed of herself,” Trump tweeted. “My children, especially my 11 year old son, Barron, are having a hard time with this. Sick!” However, the recent email sent out by the former president seemed to have forgotten all this controversy. 

Trump’s email claimed the “radical-left CHEERED! Obama and Biden were SILENT! And the Fake News BLASTED it everywhere!” according to The Hill’s reporting on the content of the email.

Axios pointed out that Griffin was fired from hosting CNN’s New Year’s Eve coverage for her stunt and she revealed in January 2024 that the Justice Department had considered charging following the incident. 

“I actually just got a FOIA back, Freedom of Information Act, recently, expressing how serious they were about trying to charge me with the crime of conspiracy to assassinate the president of the United States,” Griffin said on the ‘Dinner’s on Me with Jesse Tyler Ferguson’ podcast according to The Hill.

“The SAD and HORRIFIC TRUTH is that this is STILL the Sick Dream of every Trump-Deranged lunatic out there!” Trump’s email continued. “And it’s not just me they want gone, THEY’RE REALLY COMING AFTER YOU!”

The Hill reported that the email went on to state that the former president’s guilty verdict in his New York hush money case didn’t make him flinch and added it was support from his base that “keeps the Trump Train in motion.”

Trump’s email was almost certainly intended to stoke the flames of division so his team could wring a few more bucks from his most loyal supporters. Whether or not the email brought in more campaign donations is not known, but it’s quite likely. 

Axios’ Erin Doherty claimed Trump and his team later sent out another email claiming “they” wanted to sentence him to death and explained that the emails mattered because of Trump’s previous calls for “violence and retaliation against his political enemies.”

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