As has been widely reported, Trump’s administration dissolved the National Security Council’s global health security office, which was responsible for planning for disease outbreaks. “Some of the people we cut, they haven’t been used for many, many years, and if we ever need them we can get them very quickly and rather than spending the money,” he said at a briefing last month.

On Thursday The Times reported that Trump’s own Department of Health and Human Services ran a series of simulations last year about a pandemic respiratory virus originating in China that ultimately infected 110 million Americans. The exercise “drove home just how underfunded, underprepared and uncoordinated the federal government would be for a life-or-death battle with a virus for which no treatment existed.” Yet there’s little evidence of a serious push to increase America’s readiness.

When this coronavirus emerged in China, Trump’s instinct was to treat it as a public relations problem, insisting repeatedly that it would “go away.” South Korea and the United States announced their first coronavirus cases at around the same time; while South Korea ramped up the production of tests, the United States dithered. As Reuters reported, South Korea, a country of around 51 million, has tested 290,000 people. In the United States, a country of 330 million, only 60,000 tests had been conducted as of Tuesday.

Trump’s decision to ban some travel from Europe might have made sense, but the mistake-ridden Oval Office address announcing the move caused mass panic among Americans abroad. No one made adequate preparations to get hordes of travelers returning from coronavirus hot zones through security quickly, leading to crowds of people waiting as long as seven hours at some airports, a situation that seemed bound to spread infections.

Steven Teles is a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center and a political science professor at Johns Hopkins, where he teaches a class on policy disasters. He points out that most government decisions never reach the president’s desk, but that people in the bureaucracy tend to respond to the president’s priorities.

“What an executive can do is to inject energy and a general sense of direction to people who are going to make decisions without them pushing them all the way up the chain of command,” Teles told me. He suspects that when books are finally written about this debacle, a big part of the story will be that much of “the government didn’t get sufficiently energized early enough because there wasn’t a signal from the top.”