Last Tuesday night in Manhattan, Jackson Refit, a 22-year-old from Texas, cried during the first professional play he ever saw, which was about him.
"Homeland," which recently opened on Broadway, tells the story of how Jackson reported his father, Guy Refit, a member of the anti-government Three Percenter militia, for his role in the January 6 riot. The piece shows Guy becoming increasingly radicalized and agitated, stockpiling weapons and boasting to Jackson, a Bernie Sanders supporter, that something big is coming. He ended up taking a gun to the Capitol, where he threatened to drag Nancy Pelosi out of the building by her feet. A few days later, he told Jackson and his sister: "If you report me, you are traitors, and traitors are shot."
What he didn't know was that Jackson, in a panic over his father's violent outbursts, had sent a tip to the FBI on Christmas Eve 2020. After the attack on the Capitol, he met with the agent and later testified at the trial where Guy was found guilty and subsequently sentenced to more than seven years in prison.
Jackson had nothing to do with the creation of the play, which is a piece of documentary theater in which every sentence is taken from official sources such as court records and recordings. "Fatherland" uses his words and his story, but not his name - the characters are simply called Father and Son. Jackson first learned about the play from a message from his sister when it was shown in Los Angeles this year. But since then he had been in contact with its author, Steven Sachs, and decided he had to see it for himself, so he went to New York.
The experience of sitting in the dark and watching the worst moments of my life relived on stage was both harrowing and therapeutic. He didn't expect it all to look so real.
One of the reasons I wanted to talk to Jackson, an earnest, polite student who wears a T-shirt celebrating labor organizing, is that his story, while extreme, is also typical of the Donald Trump years, which have been marked by countless stories of tearing families apart. Some of those breakups include famous people, such as George and Kellyanne Conway, Elon Musk and his daughter Vivian, as well as Rudy Giuliani and his daughter Carolina. Many others are anonymous. A 2017 Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 13 percent of respondents had cut off a relationship with a family member or close friend because of the presidential election. When Kamala Harris picked Tim Volz as her VP running mate, girls cried on TikTok because it reminded them of their fathers before the MAGA rage started taking over them.
Jesselyn Cook's excellent recent book "Silent Damage" tells the story of families destroyed by the Trumpist cult Qanon. "The havoc that Cuannon and similar conspiracy theories have wreaked on American democracy and public health is well documented," Cook writes. "Less acknowledged is the paralyzing destruction they create inside the home, behind closed doors and away from the public eye." She chose the five families that form the core of her narrative from the hundreds of people she spoke to.
A 2017 Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 13 percent of respondents had cut off a relationship with a family member or close friend because of the presidential election
This is the intimate side of the cold civil war that America has been stuck in for nearly a decade. Life during the Trump presidency has often felt like we are trapped in an abusive relationship, with the need to be hypervigilant to the unpredictable moods of the paterfamilias. We had to endure the usual threats of violence and constant gaslighting, a term for the malicious undermining of one's sense of reality, which only became mainstream after Trump's victory. Not surprisingly, this dynamic was repeated in the families of some of Trump's fans. And it makes sense that one of the first plays to deal with January 6th would be, at its core, about the pain of family breakup.
As Jackson tells it, before Trump's rise, he and his father were very close. Gaj was often absent because of his job in the oil industry, "but when he was at home, he was more than an amazing father," says Jackson. "I mean, he raised me to be who I am, to make those decisions, an honest and loving man."
Gaius' work took the family all over the world; before 2016, they lived in an apartment in Penang, Malaysia, where he earned a six-figure salary and sent the children to a private school. But that year the price of oil crashed and he lost his job. Having suddenly run out of money, he returned to the United States, but it was months before he could afford to finance the return of his wife and three children home to join him.
Jackson was grateful that the show portrayed his father as more than a caricature and said he empathized with the tensions that made him feel betrayed by his country and want someone to blame.
"I understand my father's struggle," he told me. "I was there. I lived it". He could imagine, he said, how terrible it must have been for his father to find himself out of a job and kicked out of the middle class. Gaj, he said, found a desperately needed sense of purpose on the extreme right of the MAGA movement.
Jackson learned from "It Could Happen Here," a podcast about the possibility of a second American Civil War, that societies at war often experience a strengthening sense of social cohesion. "In my father's mind, it's no different than that," he said, convinced his father felt he was "making a contribution to helping the world."
I appreciate the impulse toward empathy, which drives much of the liberal writing and thinking about those who have immersed themselves in the ideology of the MAGA world, including "Fatherland". However, it is worth noting how rarely this noble sentiment is reciprocated.
Jackson had limited communication with his parents after the trial. His mother, Nicole Refit, now lives in Washington with two other members of the Movement for Justice for the January 6th participants, including Miki Witthoeft, the mother of slain rioter Ashley Babbitt. They hold nightly vigils for detained rebels. One of their neighbors is Hanna Rosin of The Atlantic, who recently wrote about how she and her partner met them in an attempt to overcome instinctive party bias. "We cannot afford to turn into our most disgusting online selves, in person, with our neighbors," Rosin wrote.
Rosin quoted Nikol as saying, "I am the person who is by your side until the end." I don't have many people like that. But the ones I have, that's all. Miki is one of those people. Gaj is one of those people".
It is far from her son being like that. Still, he sympathizes with her. "She really didn't move on," he said and added, "I don't blame her, because I know she feels like she's cornered. I know there aren't many places she could go. There is not much community”.
I asked Jackson if he was afraid that Trump might pardon his father if he returned to the White House. I thought about how a pardon would confirm his parents' narrative of patriotic martyrdom and make it even harder for them to return to some sort of shared sense of reality. But he fears something much more urgent: what his father might do to him.
Jackson receives constant threats from his father's supporters. The message he received on Sunday said: “You better look over your shoulder when you're walking down the street. Traitors like you will be hanged for treason".
A few months after January 6, he bought a gun and installed security cameras around his house. "I was really paranoid for a long time," he told me. "And you know, I feel like I got rid of a lot of that recently, but the possibility that he could be pardoned is terrifying."
Gaius's words about traitors still echo in his head. "In his mind, I'm 100 percent a traitor to his family," Jackson said. He still loves his father, but understands him well enough to take him seriously.
The article was published in the "New York Times"
Prepared by: A.Š.
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