The national debate set off by Donald Trump’s announcement that he wanted churches packed on Easter was, like so many Trump crises, a self-inflicted one. In the days after Trump tweeted that “WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF,” his medical advisers, led by Dr. Anthony Fauci, implored Trump not to relax the government’s social distancing guidelines. Trump dug in. “His view was: I need to show people that there is light at the end of the tunnel,” a former West Wing official told me. Under pressure, members of the coronavirus task force discussed privately how parts of the country might be opened in April, but cautioned Trump not to get locked into a specific timetable given the deteriorating conditions in New York hospitals and ominous upticks in cases in New Orleans, Detroit, and elsewhere. “They discussed it internally, but they never intended Trump to announce it,” a Republican working with the task force told me.

Trump’s impulsive decision—and its messy aftermath—consumed the West Wing during the critical week that governors were pleading with the White House to deliver medical supplies before hospital systems began to collapse. “It was totally crazy,” the Republican told me. Dr. Fauci, Senator Lindsey Graham, and others raced to convince Trump that an Easter opening would be a cataclysmic error that could cost millions of lives. “This is a very, very stressful situation for everybody, including me,” Fauci told me in a phone interview on Monday. By last weekend Fauci’s arguments broke through: Trump agreed to extend the social distancing guidelines until the end of April.

Trump’s latest tonal and tactical shift (and almost certainly not the last) was driven by several factors, both personal and political. Trump learned that his close friend, 78-year-old New York real estate mogul Stan Chera, had contracted COVID-19 and fallen into a coma at NewYork-Presbyterian. “Boy, did that hit home. Stan is like one of his best friends,” said prominent New York Trump donor Bill White. Trump also grew concerned as the virus spread to Trump country. “The polling sucked. The campaign panicked about the numbers in red states. They don’t expect to win states that are getting blown to pieces with coronavirus,” a former West Wing official told me. From the beginning of the crisis, Trump had struggled to see it as anything other than a political problem, subject to his usual arsenal of tweets and attacks and bombast. But he ultimately realized that as bad as the stock market was, getting coronavirus wrong would end his presidency. “The campaign doesn’t matter anymore,” he recently told a friend, “what I do now will determine if I get reelected.”

For an ordinary West Wing dealing with a crisis of this magnitude, the chief of staff would be a central player, mediating, delegating, making the trains run on time. But Trump has only very intermittently been able to tolerate another person with power in his White House. Mick Mulvaney had essentially been a lame duck for months, and since he was pushed out in early March, there’s been no chief of staff at all—Mark Meadows, whom Trump appointed weeks ago, only resigned his congressional seat on Monday to fill the post. “How can you not have a chief of staff during one of the biggest crises in American history?” a former West Wing official said.

Jared Kushner, who’s often been in competition with Trump’s chiefs of staff, continues to be the central West Wing player, leading a shadow coronavirus task force that is more powerful than the official group led by Vice President Mike Pence. In conversations Kushner has blamed HHS Secretary Alex Azar for the criticism Trump has received, according to a person in frequent touch with the West Wing. “This was a total mess,” Kushner told people when he got involved last month. “I know how to make this government run now,” he said, according to a source.