On the evening of Sept. 24 in midtown Manhattan, Jackson Reffitt, a 22-year-old from Texas, cried through the first professional play he’d ever seen, which was about him.
“Fatherland,” which recently opened off-Broadway, tells the story of how Jackson came to turn in his father, Guy Reffitt, a member of the anti-government Three Percenter militia, for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. It depicts Guy growing increasingly radicalized and agitated, stocking up on weapons and boasting to Jackson, a Bernie Sanders supporter, that something big was in the offing. He eventually carried a gun to the Capitol, where he threatened to drag Nancy Pelosi out of the building by her ankles. A few days later, he told Jackson and his sister, “If you turn me in, you’re a traitor, and traitors get shot.”
What he didn’t realize is that Jackson, panicked by his father’s violent outbursts, had sent a tip to the FBI on Christmas Eve 2020. After the Capitol attack, he met with an agent, and later testified at the trial where Guy was convicted and then sentenced to more than seven years in prison.
Jackson had nothing to do with the creation of the play, a piece of documentary theater in which every line was taken from official sources like court records and recordings. “Fatherland” uses his words and his story but not his name — the characters are referred to simply as Father and Son. Jackson first learned of it from a text from his sister when it opened in Los Angeles this year. But he’d since been in touch with its creator, Stephen Sachs, and decided he had to see it for himself, traveling to New York and staying with friends in Brooklyn.
The experience of sitting in the dark and watching the worst moments of his life re-created onstage was at once wrenching and therapeutic. He hadn’t expected it all to feel so real.
One reason I was eager to speak to Jackson, an earnest, polite community-college student wearing a T-shirt celebrating labor organizing, is that his story, while extreme, is also archetypical of the Trump years, which have been marked by countless tales of family estrangement. Some of these ruptures involve famous people, like George and Kellyanne Conway, Elon Musk and his daughter Vivian, and Rudy Giuliani and his daughter, Caroline. Many more are anonymous. A 2017 Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 13% of respondents had ended a relationship with a family member or close friend because of the presidential election. When Kamala Harris chose Tim Walz as her running mate, girls sobbed on TikTok that he reminded them of their dads before they started mainlining MAGA rage.
Jesselyn Cook’s excellent recent book, “The Quiet Damage,” tells the stories of family ripped apart by the Trumpist cult of QAnon. “The havoc that QAnon and similar conspiracy theories have wrought on American democracy and public health is well documented,” Cook writes. “Less acknowledged is the crippling devastation that they unleash inside the home, behind closed doors and out of public view.” She chose the five families who make up the core of her narrative out of hundreds of people she spoke to.
This is the intimate side of the cold civil war America has been stuck in for nearly a decade. Life under Trump’s presidency often felt like being trapped in an abusive relationship, with its need to be hypervigilant about the patriarch’s mercurial moods. We had to endure casual threats of violence and unceasing gaslighting, a term for maliciously undermining someone’s sense of reality that became ubiquitous only after Trump’s election. It is not surprising that this dynamic was repeated in the families of some of Trump’s worshippers. And it makes sense that the one of the first plays to grapple with Jan. 6 would be, at its heart, about the grief of family dissolution.
As Jackson tells it, before Trump’s rise, he and his father were very close. Guy’s job in the oil industry meant he was often away from home, “but when he was there, he was more than an amazing father,” said Jackson. “I mean, he raised me to be who I am, to make those decisions, an honest, loving man.”
Guy’s work took the family all over the world; before 2016, they were living in a condo in Penang, Malaysia, where he earned a six-figure salary and sent his kids to private school. But that year, the price of oil collapsed, and he lost his job. Suddenly broke, he returned to the United States, but it was months before he could afford to fly his wife and three kids home to join him.
Jackson was grateful that the play presented his dad as more than a caricature, and said he sympathizes with the strains that left him feeling betrayed by his country and eager for someone to blame. “I understand my dad’s struggle,” he told me. “I was there. I lived it.” He could imagine, he said, how scary it was for his father to find himself unemployed and cast out of the middle class. Guy, he said, found a desperately needed sense of purpose on the far-right edge of the MAGA movement.
Jackson had learned, from “It Could Happen Here,” a podcast about the possibility of a second American Civil War, that societies at war often experience an exhilarating sense of social cohesion. “In my dad’s mind, it’s no different than that,” he said, convinced that his father felt he was “contributing to helping the world.”
I appreciate the impulse toward empathy, which animates a great deal of liberal writing and thinking about those who’ve plunged through the MAGA looking glass, “Fatherland” included. Yet it’s worth noting how rarely this noble sentiment is reciprocated.
Jackson has had limited communication with his parents since the trial. His mother, Nicole Reffitt, now lives in Washington with two other members of the Justice for Jan. 6ers movement, including Micki Witthoeft, the mother of a slain rioter, Ashli Babbitt. They hold nightly vigils for detained insurrectionists. One of their neighbors is The Atlantic’s Hanna Rosin, who recently wrote about how she and her partner, in an attempt to transcend knee-jerk partisanship, have gotten to know them. “We can’t allow ourselves to morph into our nastiest online selves, in person, with our neighbors,” wrote Rosin.
Rosin quoted Nicole saying: “I’m a ride-or-die person. I don’t have a lot of those people. But the ones I do have, it’s till the end. Micki is one of those people. Guy is one of those people.”
It’s far from clear that her son is. Still, he feels for her. “She hasn’t really moved on,” he said, adding, “I don’t blame her, because I know she feels cornered. I know she doesn’t have a lot of places to go. She doesn’t have much community.”
I asked Jackson if he was worried that Trump would pardon his father if he returns to the White House. I’d been thinking about the way a pardon would confirm his parents’ narrative of patriotic martyrdom and make it that much harder for them to find their way back to some shared sense of reality. But he feared something much more immediate: what his father might do to him.
Jackson gets constant threats from his dad’s supporters; part of a message that he received Sunday said, “You better be looking over your shoulder as you walk down the street. Traitors like you will be hung for treason.” A few months after Jan. 6 he bought a gun and put security cameras around his home. “I was really paranoid for a long amount of time,” he told me. “And you know, I feel like I’ve let go of a lot of that recently, but him potentially being pardoned, it’s terrifying.”
Guy’s words about traitors still ring in his head. “In his mind, I am 100% a traitor to his family,” said Jackson. He still loves his father, but he understands him well enough to take him seriously.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
