[6] In 2018, Gerson and commentator Amy Holmes co-hosted In Principle, a politically conservative-oriented television talk show that ran for eight episodes on PBS.

"No one doubts that he did his job exceptionally well," wrote Ramesh Ponnuru in a 2007 article otherwise very critical of Gerson in National Review.

On the other hand, he wrote, the speeches would announce new policies that were never implemented, making the speechwriting in some ways less influential than ever.

[citation needed] Gerson proposed the use of a "smoking gun/mushroom cloud" mixed-metaphor during a September 5, 2002, meeting of the White House Iraq Group, in an effort to sell the American public on the nuclear dangers posed by Saddam Hussein.

According to Newsweek columnist Michael Isikoff, The original plan had been to place it in an upcoming presidential speech, but WHIG members fancied it so much that when the Times reporters contacted the White House to talk about their upcoming piece [about aluminum tubes], one of them leaked Gerson's phrase – and the administration would soon make maximum use of it.

[22] In an article by Matthew Scully, one of Bush's speechwriters, published in The Atlantic in September 2007, Gerson was criticized for seeking the limelight, taking credit for other people's work and creating a false image of himself.

Scully claims that the phrase "axis of hatred" was coined by David Frum and forwarded to colleagues by email.

We were working on a State of the Union address in John [McConnell]'s office when suddenly Mike was called away for an unspecified appointment, leaving us to 'keep going'.

We learned only later, from a chance conversation with his secretary, where he had gone, and it was a piece of Washington self-promotion for the ages: At the precise moment when the State of the Union address was being drafted at the White House by John and me, Mike was off [at a Washington D.C. Starbucks store] pretending to craft the State of the Union in longhand for the benefit of a reporter.

One of Gerson's first columns was entitled "Letting Fear Rule", in which he compared skeptics of President Bush's immigration reform bill to nativist bigots of the 1880s.

They reveal a president raging against enemies, obsessed by slights, deeply uninformed and incurious, unable to focus, and subject to destructive whims.