MEGYN KELLY (HOST): What was it that made you not decide to do it?
DAVID FRENCH: I'm going to say two things. Number one, I did an eight day serious look at this, and I discovered there is a path for an independent. It does exist; there's a lot of people who say no, the challenges are too much; that's not true. 65 percent of Americans are interested in another option. 90 percent of millennials interested in another option. But I'm not the right person to do it, you have to have someone with their own independent constituencies. Somebody who can hit the ground not just running but hit the ground sprinting. And if they can do that they can make a dramatic national splash. And at the end of the day I didn't want to do more harm than good, these are sad times in our country. And I felt like somebody should step up. But I also know that there are times that somebody is in fact not better than nobody, if there's a possibility that somebody could actually hurt the cause they love.
KELLY: How would it have hurt the cause?
FRENCH: There's a reality that if somebody steps into the arena and doesn't have huge name ID, as Reince noted -- he's a decent political analyst, even if he's covering for a man who is doing terrible things -- if you don't have that big name recognition, there is a chance, that if it fizzles, people will get the impression that the movement to preserve conservative ideas, to preserve conservative integrity, to maintain integrity in the party of Lincoln is weaker than it really is. It's really quite strong and people need to know that.
KELLY: What kind of blowback, if any, did you get when you were mulling it over?
FRENCH: Instantaneous, massive blowback. It was really interesting. For somebody who's supposed to be completely irrelevant over here it was stunning the level of blowback I got. A Trump operative tracked down one of my wife's family members in Tennessee to say that it was going to be really rough for me if I tried this, there was pressure placed on a number of pressure points, and that didn't deter me. Because if you know you're going to go into this poisonous political environment, you expect to get hit immediately. It didn't even matter what my biography was. It didn't matter what I'd done in my life, which is the fact that I was considering taking on Donald Trump meant that I had to be attacked, and I was.
