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President Donald Trump’s failure to respond to the coronavirus pandemic didn’t begin with the administration’s inability to send out the millions of test kits experts say are needed to tackle the crisis. It didn’t start with Trump’s bungled messaging downplaying the crisis even as it’s worsened.

It began in April 2018 — more than a year and a half before the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the disease it causes, Covid-19, sickened enough people in China that authorities realized they were dealing with a new disease.

The Trump administration, with John Bolton newly at the helm of the White House National Security Council, began dismantling the team in charge of pandemic response, firing its leadership and disbanding the team in spring 2018.

The cuts, coupled with the administration’s repeated calls to cut the budget for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other public health agencies, made it clear that the Trump administration wasn’t prioritizing the federal government’s ability to respond to disease outbreaks.

That lack of attention to preparedness, experts say, now helps explain why the Trump administration has botched its response to the coronavirus pandemic.

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Infighting, missteps and a son-in-law hungry for action: Inside the Trump administration’s troubled coronavirus response

The economy was grinding to a halt. Stocks were in free fall. Schools were closing. Public events were being canceled. New cases of the novel coronavirus were popping up across the country.

And then, on Wednesday, the day the World Health Organization designated the coronavirus a pandemic, Jared Kushner joined the tumult.

President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser — who has zero expertise in infectious diseases and little experience marshaling the full bureaucracy behind a cause — saw the administration floundering and inserted himself at the helm, believing he could break the logjam of internal dysfunction.

Kushner rushed to help write Trump’s widely panned Oval Office address to the nation. His supermodel sister-in-law’s father, Kurt Kloss, an emergency room doctor, crowdsourced suggestions from his Facebook network to pass along to Kushner. And Kushner pressed tech executives to help build a testing website and retail executives to help create mobile testing sites — but the projects were only half-baked when Trump revealed them Friday in the White House Rose Garden.

Kushner entered into a crisis management process that, despite the triumphant and self-congratulatory tone of public briefings, was as haphazard and helter-skelter as the chaotic early days of Trump’s presidency — turning into something of a family-and-friends pandemic response operation.

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From complacency to emergency: How Trump changed course on coronavirus

Over the course of a week, as leaders across the nation raced ahead of a conflicted president, Trump ultimately swung from resistance to capitulation — transforming his tone and executing extreme measures to combat a widening crisis.

President Donald Trump assured Americans on Wednesday the deadly coronavirus was on the brink of disappearing. Two days later, he admitted it wasn’t.

In the span of 48 hours this week, from the moment markets plunged after a confusing and stiff Oval Office address to his national emergency declaration from the Rose Garden, Trump watched his own assessment of the viral outbreak transform in extraordinary fashion, forcing him into a course correction.

The unprecedented shutdown of the world’s largest economy — a nation of 330 million people — will mark the most consequential stretch of Trump’s presidency and transform how Americans think about their government. For Trump himself, the journey appeared to represent a recognition that his earlier path threatened to engulf a nation he oversees with a spreading pandemic and diminish hope for reelection this fall.

Trump’s do-over approach — he unlocked $50 billion in government funding on Friday to address the growing crisis and threw his support behind House Democrats’ aid package hours later — followed weeks of the president shrugging off the coronavirus threat and making statements about the availability of tests, the severity of the virus and the development of a COVID-19 vaccine that his own officials had to correct, sometimes within minutes of being made.

During a visit to Capitol Hill on Tuesday, Trump said the virus “will go away” and said his response was “really working out.”

Instead, the forecast grew worse. State and local leaders, business executives and tens of millions of ordinary Americans leapfrogged their president — without waiting for White House guidance — to shut down public spaces, schools, offices and other gathering spaces and encourage millions of Americans to hunker down for a fast-spreading, invisible threat.