To the editor:

I’m responding to the Nov. 13 letters of Mike Everett (“Trump won and that’s a good thing”) and Kissan Joseph (“Mona Charen is very misguided”).

Defending Donald Trump, Mr. Everett wrote: “You cannot tell me that you weren’t better off four years ago!” But I wholeheartedly can. In November 2020, COVID cases rose sharply. Trump turned mask-wearing into a culture-war issue. The CDC asked Americans to stay home for Thanksgiving to stop the spread. The week of Nov. 7 saw 8,754 U.S. COVID deaths. Thankfully, President Biden followed experts’ advice and brought deaths down. We’re free to travel this Thanksgiving.

Mr. Everett’s complaints about Biden’s term apparently are based on Trump’s false statements. For example, he says the U.S. is flooded with criminals and fentanyl. But researchers told NPR in October that they’ve seen less fentanyl on the streets in the last six months. Fentanyl deaths declined 10% in the last year, provisional CDC data indicated. Arrests of border-crossers convicted of a crime rose from 2,438 in 2020 to 17,048 in 2024, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported.

In the second letter, Mr. Joseph disagrees with Charen’s statement that Trump policies would shift the nation toward being a Third World country. He uses a metric drawn from one-day snapshots of markets to dream up wealth creation and validate a Trump presidency. He writes: “This evidence is at astronomical variance with Ms. Charen’s conjecture.” But his data point doesn’t prove anything. I say that’s conjecture.

Juli Warren-Ward,

Lawrence