Trump Treats My Family Like They’re Throwing Away – Jan 6 Rioter’s Daughter

• Guy Refit was sentenced to seven years in prison for his part in the Capitol riots.
• “It’s just that former President Trump will be convicted,” his daughter told Insider.
• “As the political climate worsens, the modern American family is becoming more fragile,” she said.

Peyton Rafitt, 18, was handed the longest prison sentence ever for what began as a dinner-table argument over her family’s breakup and her father’s involvement in a Trump-inspired Capitol riot.

The young woman from Texas said that American family life in the Trump era has taken on a toxic dimension.

Peyton’s family’s disintegration began with a quarrel between father and son, and ended when her brother, Jackson Rafit, an 18-year-old boy, turned his father in to the FBI.

In the year After the Capitol uprising in 2021, 49-year-old Guy Refit returned to Wylie, a Dallas suburb, and told Jackson and then-16-year-old Peyton that they would be “traitors” if they let him in.

But Jackson resigned from the FBI in December 2020 after growing concern about his father’s radical right-wing rhetoric.

“We are an example of how the modern American family is becoming weaker as the political climate grows,” Peyton told Insider. “It is not enough to protect American families from the influence of propaganda and misinformation.”

Radicalize my father

Peyton Reffitt, FBI/Fox News video

Guy Refit was part of a militia movement called the Three Percenters, many of whom joined the January 6 uprising.

The movement is based on the myth that only 3% of the colonists fought in the Revolutionary War. Members described themselves as “modern-day versions of those revolutionaries, fighting a more tyrannical American government than the British.”

Guy Refitt On August 1, he was sentenced to seven years and three months in prison, the longest prison sentence ever given to any of the Capitol rioters. He was found guilty of carrying a weapon to Congress, interfering with police and threatening his children, NBC reported.

Immediately after their father was sentenced, on the steps of the court, Peyton and her sister Sarah tried to understand what happened to their family in front of the television cameras. Payton went viral on social media when he told reporters, “Trump deserves a life sentence if my dad is in prison for a long time.”

Peyton believes her family – and others like them – have been treated as “puppets” in a power struggle.

“Former President Trump is not entirely responsible for my father’s actions on that day, January 6th. But, in my opinion, I believe he used artificial language leading up to and including the day. It appeals to the rationality and emotionality of his supporters,” she told Insider in a text.

Peyton Reffitt

“I think only if former President Trump were convicted of the events of January 6, 2021 and served the longest sentence,” Payton said.

Peyton joins the majority of Americans who believe Trump should be impeached on Jan. 6, according to IPSOS and ABC News polls.

Trump’s prison sentence is “a true example of accountability for our future as a nation to protect all American families and democracy,” she said.

Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images

In the past few years, families and friendships have been destroyed by extremist views, misinformation and conspiracy theories.

A Reuters/Ipsos survey conducted in the first few months of Trump’s presidency found that 16 percent of respondents said they had lost contact with a friend or family member since the 2016 election.

Jacqueline Hammond, 47, a bartender in Asheville, North Carolina, who has cut ties with her mother Carol, a Trump supporter, told Reuters: “Trump is like an earthquake that splits two ideological continents and once the earth is divided. There’s no going back.”

Although her father is incarcerated and her brother is estranged from the family, Peyton says she sees light at the end of the tunnel and believes her family can heal with time.

“As a family, we don’t have to fully understand each other, but appreciating differences without judgment is a good lesson that broadens our perspective,” she said.