Opinion: I Turned In My Insurrectionist Dad—How Can Trump Be Immune?

Jackson Reffitt could not believe what he was hearing.

“Today? Wow! Are you serious?”

Reffitt, 21, of Wylie, Texas, had just been told by The Daily Beast that the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled the president is largely immune from prosecution—a new power that may include absolving Donald Trump’s incitement of those who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Among the insurrectionists was Jackson’s father, Guy, who was sentenced to 81 months in federal prison for his actions that day.

Jackson was the one who alerted the FBI to his father’s activities and testified against him in one of the first Jan. 6 trials. But in his view, the person most to blame for the riot was Trump himself.

“My dad ran up the Capitol steps under Trump flags,” Reffitt told The Daily Beast. “If Trump was not involved, my father would have never been there. He would have never heard that language to incite him to really think that he’s doing something good, that he’s going to protect the country, that he’s going to fight for it.”

He continued, “My dad was out listening to Trump’s speech right before going up to the Capitol. And, all my dad was saying is, ‘Once he’s done talking, we're going right to that Capitol.’ Without Trump’s language that day, I doubt he would have the energy or motive to do that.”

Reffitt is certain that Trump deliberately roused his father and the others into what followed.

“He was using that sort of language to incite, to scare, to fearmonger, and to get people really active in a very dangerous way,” he said. “Which for people like my dad that fell down a rabbit hole, [it] really, really dug into his mind, into thinking of himself as a martyr, into thinking of himself as someone that needs to do this to save his family, when in reality, Trump just used them.”

Reffitt added, “Trump went home, and my dad was arrested 20 days later.”

Jackson’s mother stood by his father, regularly attending a vigil at the “J6 corner” outside the D.C. Jail, singing the National Anthem along with the supposed ”political prisoners” inside every night. She even talked to Trump once when he called the group.

“My mom is like the last person I expected to fall down that rabbit hole of, falling in line to support a single individual rather than ideals, which is what my parents fell into very, very hard, in supporting this person without care of what happens,” Jackson said. “It’s very, very, very dangerous.”

His two sisters were caught in the middle.

“Trump destroyed my whole family,” Reffitt said. “Without Trump, my family would still be together. I 100 percent guarantee you. It was a perfect family, until 2016 and onwards. It spiraled and polarized and it splintered. It was all due to the president.”

Reffitt noted that when his father was sentenced, his younger sister, Peyton, then 17, told reporters outside the courthouse, “Trump deserves life in prison if my father is in prison for this long.”

Jackson said of his father, “He is a martyr for someone that used him.”

Prosecutors in Washington, D.C., and Georgia secured indictments last year in an effort to make Trump accountable for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

But now the conservative majority of the Supreme Court has changed the rule of law into the law of rulers.

“Disgusting,” Reffitt said, adding, “It’s scary that Trump is getting away with it.”

Jackson feels certain that his father, along with his mother and the rest of the Jan. 6 crowd applauded the highest court’s lowly decision.

“I’m sure they're happy to know that the person that they follow, the person they support and they fought for is going to be able to walk free and do it again, if he likes,” Jackson said.

Read more at The Daily Beast.