Any wifi experts?

I have a borrowed 13” MacBook Pro from a few years back running macOS 11.7.1 It occasionally has a problem trying to turn on wifi when it is first booted. But it eventually does turn on and I can then connect to wifi without any problems. Yesterday was definitely different. When I clicked on the wifi symbol, the blue switch in the menu bar was turned on but the wifi symbol was showing that it was searching for a network connection. I went to system preferences and checked what network preferences were showing. Wifi status is off and the white button is displayed to allow me to click on it to turn it on. But as soon as I click, it turns itself back off. And it’s been doing that for two days. The only connection I can get is Bluetooth to my iPhone and I have very bad phone reception here so my internet connection is equally bad. In my searches yesterday, I found a Terminal command to turn off Airport, but I couldn’t find any corresponding command to turn it on. I don’t ***know*** if that will work, but I would like to give it a try. Thanks for any help.