[4] He has taken credit for the famous phrase "axis of evil" in Bush's 2002 State of the Union address, and he is considered a voice in the neoconservative movement.

[3] 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.

In 1994–2000, he worked as a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, as a contributing editor at neoconservative opinion magazine The Weekly Standard, and as a columnist for Canada's National Post.

[23] 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.

[24] Shortly after the September 11 attacks, Frum hosted pseudonymous Muslim apostate and critic of Islam, Ibn Warraq at an hour-and-a-half lunch at the White House.

[25] While serving in the Bush White House and afterward, Frum strongly supported the Iraq War by furthering the conspiracy theory that Saddam Hussein was in league with the terrorist group Al-Qaeda.

[citation needed] In later years, however, he would express regret for that endorsement, 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.

Commentator Robert Novak, appearing on CNN, claimed that Frum was dismissed because his wife had emailed friends, saying that her husband had invented the "axis of evil" phrase.

During the early days of his stint there, Frum coauthored An End to Evil with Richard Perle, which presented a neoconservative view of global affairs and an apologia of the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

In 2005, Frum faced a libel lawsuit filed by the Canadian chapter of the Council on American–Islamic Relations 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.

"[33]On October 11, 2007, Frum announced on his blog that he was joining Rudolph Giuliani's presidential campaign as a senior foreign policy adviser.

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.

Citing personal reasons shortly after the deaths of his father and father-in-law, Frum suspended his blog on June 3, 2013[41] but resumed writing for The Daily Beast in September 2013.

During the 2014 Israel–Gaza conflict, Frum issued a series of tweets labeling as "fake" a photo of two blood-covered Palestinian youths bringing their father's body to a hospital in Khan Younis; the man had been killed in an Israeli airstrike.

[46] On November 6, 2024, Frum announced that he had left the Republican Party following Donald Trump's victory in the 2024 United States presidential election.

It "expressed intense dissatisfaction with supply-siders, evangelicals, and nearly all Republican politicians", according to a negative review by a Frum opponent, Robert Novak.

[21] 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,"[48] and Daniel McCarthy of The American Conservative called it "a crisply written indictment of everything its author disliked about conservatism in the early '90s.

Frum 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.

[58][59] He helped write George W. Bush's famous "Axis of Evil" speech to describe the governments of Iraq, Iran and North Korea.

In it he described the evolution of his opinion from a "strong opponent" 14 years prior; while he had feared that its introduction would cause "the American family [to] become radically more unstable," he now feels that "the case against same-sex marriage has been tested against reality.

"[64] In 2013, Frum was a signatory to an amicus curiae brief submitted to the Supreme Court in support of same-sex marriage during the Hollingsworth v. Perry case.

Frum specifically urged the commissioning of a surgeon general's report on firearms health effects on individual ownership (writing that "such a report would surely reach the conclusion that a gun in the home greatly elevates risks of suicide, lethal accident and fatal domestic violence"), and he called for Senate hearings regarding the practices of firearms manufacturers.

[77] In an article for National Review Online that he posted days before the 2008 election, he gave ten reasons why he was going to vote for McCain instead of Barack Obama.

[80] In April 2022, when the Republican Party prohibited its candidates from participating in future presidential debates, Frum attributed the decision to the "Trump Cinematic Universe", an involuted cartoon version of reality accessible to "only those conversant with the pro-Trump right's internal myths and legends".

They are finding it in the same place that (Michele) Bachmann and her co-religionists located it 30 years ago: a deeply hostile national government controlled by alien and suspect forces, with Barack Obama as their leader and symbol."

He explained Bachmann's political views, some of which he called "paranoid": "It emerges from a religious philosophy that rejects the federal government as an alien instrument of destruction, ripping apart a Christian society.

Bachmann's religiously grounded rejection of the American state finds a hearing with many more conventional conservatives radicalized by today's hard economic times.

"[89] On August 14, 2009, on Bill Moyers Journal, Frum challenged certain Republican political tactics in opposing health care and other Democratic initiatives as "outrageous," "dangerous," and ineffective.

He described the development of an "alternative reality" within which the party, conservative think-tanks, and right wing commentators operate from a set of lies about the economy and nonexistent threats to their traditional base of supporters.