The COVID Victims On Trump’s Final Day As President

At 8:15 a.m. on Jan. 20, Donald Trump departed the White House for the last time as president, boarding the Marine One helicopter to begin his journey to Mar-a-Lago.

At that exact same moment, Kimberly Brill was in Los Angeles on her 15th straight hour of a FaceTime call, where she was saying her final goodbyes to her mom, Jan Hammac, who was in a hospital bed across the country in Pensacola, Florida, dying of COVID-19.

At 8:28 a.m, Trump and his wife landed at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland where Air Force One and a small crowd of his family and supporters were waiting as Laura Branigan’s disco song “Gloria” blared on loudspeakers.

Two minutes later, at 8:30 a.m., Hammac took her last breaths. She was 75.

“Now, I am one of many who lost their mother too soon to COVID,” Brill, 50, told BuzzFeed News. “It’s senseless, awful, and frightening.”

As she grieves, Brill has agonized over how and where her mother may have caught the coronavirus, but mostly she has wondered if the outgoing president had handled the pandemic differently, with less politics and divisiveness, whether more of his supporters, which included her mother, might still be alive.

“When she passed on the morning of the 20th, I thought it was an unbelievable irony,” Brill added. “Whereas there were members of my family that viewed it as her and Trump leaving their places together.”

Hammac was one of around 3,000 Americans to die from the coronavirus in the final 24 hours of the Trump presidency — a grim capstone to the very issue his own campaign team later privately said had cost Trump the election. As president, Trump repeatedly downplayed the severity of COVID-19, mocked mask-wearing, attacked Anthony Fauci, spread cruel conspiracy theories about healthcare workers, pontificated about injecting bleach and sunlight as a cure, and held campaign rallies believed to have caused 30,000 COVID cases and 700 deaths (including, most likely, Herman Cain’s). More than 400,000 Americans died — a number higher than any other country — as the pandemic spiraled out of control on his watch.

But the death tolls don’t convey the human faces of those lost, nor the pain of those left behind. Trump may have gone, but the anger for many remains. Death defined his presidency until the very end.

“I thought, Where is Trump right now when you’re dying?” said Cindy Catalano, a 53-year-old Pittsburgh nurse, whose son Kyle Dixon, 27, died of COVID-19 on the morning of Jan. 20. “The whole administration, where were they when all these people were dying? Now you are dying, and the person you supported is not anywhere here for you.”

When Brill thinks about her mother, she can’t help but laugh between the tears, remembering the hilarious and lively woman who raised her. One time, when Brill and her friends were teenagers, Hammac drove them from their hometown of Pensacola all the way to Birmingham, Alabama, just to go to an Amy Grant concert. “She was always up for adventure and fun,” said Brill.

Music and Christianity were two of Hammac’s biggest guiding lights in life. The daughter of a minister, she learned to play the organ at a young age and worked as an organist at her church until the end of her life.

Both of Brill’s parents contracted COVID-19 around the same time in early January, but her dad recovered fairly quickly. It wasn’t until her father called on Jan. 17 to say Hammac had been running an extremely high fever all week that it became clear it was not “nothing more than a cold,” as Hammac previously said when her husband went through it.

“She always tried to protect me,” said Brill. “I don’t think she wanted me to worry.”

When Hammac was taken to the hospital that day, Brill said she grappled with whether or not to fly back to Florida to be with her mom. But with COVID-19 case rates so high in California and travel restrictions in place, she decided to stay put so as not to potentially spread the virus further. “I had a lot of people questioning when I was coming home, and surely I was coming home,” Brill said. “So there was a tremendous amount of guilt in considering not going home.”

In the end, Brill’s dad — who was allowed…