David Jeffrey Frum (; born 30 June 1960) is a Canadian-American conservative political commentator and a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush. He is a senior editor at The Atlantic.
In 2003 Frum authored the first book about Bush's presidency written by a former member of the administration. Retrieved September 26, 2018. He has taken credit for the famous phrase "axis of evil" in Bush's 2002 State of the Union address. He is considered a core voice in the neoconservative movement."Proud wife turns 'axis of evil' speech into a resignation letter", Matthew Engel, The Guardian, February 27, 2002
Frum formerly served on the board of directors of the Republican Jewish Coalition, the British think tank Policy Exchange, the anti-drug policy group Smart Approaches to Marijuana, and as vice chairman and an associate fellow of the R Street Institute.
Early life and education Born in Toronto, Ontario, to a Jewish family, Frum is the son of the late Barbara Frum (née Rosberg), a well-known Niagara Falls, New York-born journalist and broadcaster in Canada, and the late Murray Frum, a dentist who later became a real estate developer, philanthropist, and art collector. His father's parents migrated from Poland to Toronto in 1930. Frum's sister, Linda Frum, was a member of the Senate of Canada. Frum also has an adopted brother, Matthew, from whom he is estranged.
At age 14, Frum was a campaign volunteer for an Ontario New Democratic Party candidate Jan Dukszta for the 1975 provincial election. During the hour-long commute each way to and from the campaign office in western Toronto, he read a paperback edition of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, which his mother had given to him. "My campaign colleagues jeered at the book—and by the end of the campaign, any lingering interest I might have had in the political left had vanished like yesterday's smoke."
Frum was educated at Yale University, where he took the Directed Studies program.
Career
Early career After graduation from Harvard Law School, Frum returned to Toronto as an associate editor of Saturday Night. He was an editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal from 1989 until 1992, and then a columnist for Forbes magazine in 1992–1994. In 1994–2000, he was a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, working as a contributing editor at neoconservative opinion magazine The Weekly Standard, and as a columnist for the Canadian National Post. He worked as a regular contributor for National Public Radio. In 1996, he helped organize the "Winds of Change" in Calgary, Alberta, an early effort to unite the Reform Party of Canada and the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada.Canadian Press, "Reform, Tories should merge, right-wing group says", The Globe and Mail, May 15, 1996
White House Following the 2000 U.S. presidential election of George W. Bush, Frum was appointed to a position as a speechwriter within the White House. He would later write that when he was first offered the job by Chief Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson:
While still a Canadian citizen, he was one of the few foreign nationals working within the Bush White House. He filed for naturalization and took the oath of citizenship on September 11, 2007. Frum served as special assistant to the president for economic speechwriting from January 2001 to February 2002. Conservative commentator Robert Novak described Frum as an "uncompromising supporter of Israel" and "fervent supporter of Ariel Sharon's policies" during his time in the White House. Frum is credited by his wife with inventing the expression "Axis of Evil," which Bush introduced in his 2002 State of the Union address. During Frum's time at the White House, he was described by commentator Ryan Lizza as being part of a speechwriting brain trust that brought "intellectual heft" and considerable policy influence to the Bush Administration.
Shortly after the September 11 attacks, Frum hosted Ibn Warraq, a pseudonymous Muslim apostate and critic of Islam, at an hour-and-a-half luncheon at the White House.
While serving in the Bush White House and afterward, Frum strongly supported the Iraq War by furthering the claim that Saddam Hussein was in league with the terrorist group Al-Qaeda. In later years, however, he would express regret for that characterization, saying that it owed more to psychological and group identity factors than reasoned judgment:"It's human nature to assess difficult questions, not on the merits, but on our feelings about the different 'teams' that form around different answers. To cite a painful personal experience: During the decision-making about the Iraq war, I was powerfully swayed by the fact that the proposed invasion of Iraq was supported by those who had been most right about the Cold War, and was most bitterly opposed by those who had been wrongest about the Cold War. Yet in the end, it is not teams that matter. It is the results. As Queen Victoria's first prime minister bitterly quipped after a policy fiasco: 'What wise men had promised has not happened. What the damned fools predicted has actually come to pass.'"He later acknowledged that it remains unclear how the USA "could have delivered better success in Iraq" in terms of replacing Saddam with a "more humane and peaceful" government.
Frum left the White House in February 2002. Commentator Robert Novak, appearing on CNN, claimed that Frum was dismissed because his wife had emailed friends, saying that her husband had coined the "axis of evil" phrase. Frum and the White House denied Novak's allegation. Frum indicated that one of the most important reasons he left the White House when he did was because, as economic speech writer, he would have had to write speeches defending the imposition of tariffs to protect the domestic steel industry for domestic political reasons.
Frum opposed the nomination of Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court of the United States, because she was insufficiently qualified for the post, as well as insufficiently conservative.
American Enterprise Institute Shortly after leaving the White House, Frum took a position as a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a neoconservative think tank. During the early days of his stint there, Richard Perle and he coauthored a neoconservative view of global affairs and an apologia of the 2003 invasion of Iraq entitled, An End to Evil. His position at AEI lasted from 2003 until March 25, 2010, when his paid position was terminated and he declined to accept an offer of a non-paying position. Frum later stated that he was asked to leave AEI because of his vocal criticism of the Republican party's no-holds-barred opposition to Obamacare.
Activities after leaving the White House In 2005, Frum faced a libel lawsuit filed by the Canadian chapter of the Council on American–Islamic Relations (CAIR) after he suggested in a column for the National Post that CAIR was sympathetic to terrorists. Frum first vowed to fight the lawsuit, but instead the paper published an editor's note acknowledging that "neither Sheema Khan nor the Council on American-Islamic Relations Canada advocates or promotes terrorism". On October 11, 2007, Frum announced on his blog that he was joining Rudolph Giuliani's presidential campaign as a senior foreign policy adviser.
Frum was a contributing editor and online blogger for the National Review until November 16, 2008. Frum announced to readers of his blog that he would be starting a new political website, NewMajority.com, describing it as "a group blog, featuring many different voices. Not all of them... conservatives or Republicans." He hoped the site would "create an online community that will be exciting and appealing to younger readers, a generation often repelled by today's mainstream conservatism."
The website was launched on January 19, 2009. On October 31, 2009, its title was changed to FrumForum, to avoid confusion with other political organizations that used "New Majority" in their names. In 2012, the site was merged into The Daily Beast, where his blog continued. Citing personal reasons shortly after the deaths of his father and his father-in-law, Frum suspended his blog on June 3, 2013,Frum, David (June 3, 2013). "All Good Things". The Daily Beast. Retrieved July 27, 2013 but resumed writing for The Daily Beast in September 2013.
Frum joined The Atlantic as a senior editor in March 2014. During the 2014 Israel–Gaza conflict, Frum issued a series of tweets in which he incorrectly characterized a photograph of two blood-covered Palestinian youths bringing their father's body to a hospital in Khan Younis as being "fake". However, the man had been killed by an Israeli airstrike. Frum backtracked from his accusation, and apologized to New York Times photographer Sergey Ponomarev, after extensive debunking by Michael Shaw, but justified his "skepticism", describing other "Pallywood" claims. Frum was criticized by Washington Post media writer Erik Wemple and by fellow correspondent for The Atlantic, James Fallows, who called Frum's tweets "a major journalistic error".
On November 2, 2016, he announced that he had voted for Hillary Clinton for U.S. president. The announcement garnered international coverage.
On November 6, 2024, Frum announced that he had left the Republican Party following Donald Trump's victory in the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
Books and writing Frum's first book, Dead Right, was released in 1994. It "expressed intense dissatisfaction with supply-siders, evangelicals, and nearly all Republican politicians", according to a negative review by a Frum opponent, Robert Novak. Frank Rich of The New York Times described it as "the smartest book written from the inside about the American conservative movement". William F. Buckley, Jr. found it "the most refreshing ideological experience in a generation". In 2008, Daniel McCarthy of The American Conservative called it "a crisply written indictment of everything its author disliked about conservatism in the early '90s".
He is the author of What's Right (1996) and How We Got Here (2000), which is a history of the 1970s that "framed the 1970s in the shadow of World War II and Vietnam, suggesting, 'The turmoil of the 1970s should be understood... as the rebellion of an unmilitary people against institutions and laws formed by a century of war and the preparation for war.'" Michael Barone of U.S. News & World Report praised How We Got Here, noting that "more than any other book... it shows how we came to be the way we are." John Podhoretz described it as "compulsively readable" and a "commanding amalgam of history, sociology, and polemic."
In January 2003, Frum released The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush, the first insider account of the Bush presidency. He also discussed how the events of September 11, 2001 redefined the country and the president: "George W. Bush was hardly the obvious man for the job. But by a very strange fate, he turned out to be, of all unlikely things, the right man." In 2004, Frum released his book entitled An End to Evil, co-written with Richard Perle. The book provided a defense of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and advocated regime change in Iran and Syria. It called for a tougher policy toward North Korea, and a tougher USA stance against Saudi Arabia and other Islamic nations to "win the war on terror".
Frum's first novel, Patriots, was published in April 2012. It is a political satire about the election and presidency of a fictional conservative American president.
In 2018, Frum published Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic, about the dangers posed by the Trump presidency to American democracy. He was interviewed for the book on the New Books Network. In 2020, he published a second volume about the Trump era and its consequences, Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy.
Appearances on public radio