David Frum

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.

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.

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:

I believed I was unsuited to the job he was offering me. I had no connection to the Bush campaign or the Bush family. I had no experience in government and little of political campaigns. I had not written a speech for anyone other than myself. And I had been only a moderately enthusiastic supporter of George W. Bush... I strongly doubted he was the right man for the job.

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. …

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. …

Frum was a commentator for American Public Media's "Marketplace" from 2007 until his final appearance on October 12, 2011. Frum has made numerous appearances on the weekly radio program Left, Right & Center on KCRW, the National Public Radio affiliate in Santa Monica, California. On the KCRW program, Frum presented the conservative viewpoint.

Frum is married to the writer Danielle Crittenden, the stepdaughter of former Toronto Sun editor Peter Worthington, and they had three children. Their daughter Miranda died in February 2024, age 32, from complications of a 2019 brain tumor. He is a distant cousin of economist Paul Krugman. Frum considers himself "a not especially observant Jew". Alexander Hamilton and Abraham Lincoln are among his favorite historical figures. Marcel Proust is his favorite novelist.