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Conservatives’ complaints that the media exaggerates the threat of the coronavirus to make President Trump look bad are at this point drearily familiar. But a few days ago, the Fox News host Steve Hilton added a new twist, an additional reason “our ruling class and their TV mouthpieces” are “whipping up fear.”

“They can afford an indefinite shutdown,” he said. And by his estimation, they don’t care enough about the tens of millions of less-privileged Americans who can’t.

Let’s leave aside the strange notion that it’s the president’s critics, and not the president himself, who have a caring deficit. Let’s not touch the odd use of “ruling class” to define those critics, most of whom can’t match the president’s wealth, cronyism, nepotism and tax shenanigans, and none of whom are rulers of his station, because none sit, as he does, at the apex of government.

Let’s look instead at Hilton’s suggestion that this pandemic is amplifying the different vulnerabilities and fates of people who occupy different tiers of wealth in America. Let’s examine the idea that as the pandemic disrupts life for some Americans much more consequentially and irreversibly than for others, resentment will rise.