Russo predicted Congress will “get excessive” in its coronavirus response. But he said most Americans will see its involvement positively and that “this may be a boost for the role of the federal government.”

“In some ways,” he said, “the promoters of big government should hope Trump is a hero.”

The prospect of upheaval isn’t an abstract notion. The 9/11 terrorist attacks — and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that resulted from them — spurred an anti-interventionist movement that led to Barack Obama’s nomination in 2008 and still resonates within the Democratic Party. The financial disaster in 2008 conceived not only the Tea Party, but an Occupy Wall Street movement that shifted the national conversation around economic inequality and the “1 percent” — catalyzing the rise of the populist progressive wing of the Democratic Party.

But unlike many past crises, the coronavirus pandemic has caused turmoil in the economy, public health and politics all at once. The death toll is rising. The stock market is in freefall. The virus has consumed Trump’s presidency and his re-election prospects, and it has all but frozen the Democratic presidential primary in time.

“Parties go back and forth, and they change somewhat,” said Ron Kaufman, the Republican National Committee treasurer and a former adviser to George H.W. Bush. “And this is going to be a big change.”

Kaufman said the longer-lasting effect of the pandemic may not be a sustained appetite to spend, but an eventual “sea change” politically as fiscal conservatives attempt to reconcile debt from the coronavirus response.

“That will change our foreign policy viewpoint, it will change our military viewpoint … It’s going to change how we look at our place in the world,” Kaufman said.

The effect of the pandemic, he said, is that “both parties are going to have to – we’re going to have to come to the left and they’re going to have to come to the right a little bit.”