David French has been fiercely critical of Donald Trump in his writing. | POLITICO screen grab David French: Trump campaign tried to intimidate me

Even before his name was floated as a third-party challenger to Donald Trump, National Review staff writer David French says, neighbors were concerned about attacks in his neighborhood and his youngest daughter was the subject of racially motivated abuse online.

Trump, French told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Tuesday, “unlocked something terrible in this country.”


French said his wife’s family in Tennessee had received a call from someone who said he was with Trump’s operation and said he was “instructed to call and deliver a message that the race would be very difficult for me.”

“Well, you know, it was probably one of the more ham-handed attempts at intimidation, which out of the Trump operation you can expect things to be done in the most incompetent way possible,” French said, going into more detail about the call. “An individual calls — he says, ‘I’m sorry, but I’ve been asked by the Trump campaign to make sure that David knows this will be really, really bad for him.’”

French, who has been fiercely critical of Trump in his writing, said he did not learn of the call until after he decided against running. French tweeted Sunday night that "after much thought and prayer," he had decided against a bid.

“I assumed if I did this, look, I have been up against Trump for some time, and the assaults on my family have been overwhelming just as a writer,” French said. “As everyone knows, Trump has an online racist mob that he often stokes by retweeting some of these horrible white supremacists. As that online racist mob is fond of pointing out, I have a multiracial family, and so they have gone after my youngest daughter in the worst way imaginable.”

French and his wife, Nancy, adopted their youngest daughter from Ethiopia in 2010.

"They attacked you for having a multiracial family?" co-host Joe Scarborough exclaimed.

"Oh, you have no idea," French remarked.

Asked whether he considered the call to his wife’s family a threat, French repeated that he viewed it as “a ham-handed effort to intimidate me.”

French provided no evidence that the Trump campaign itself was behind the phone call.

"There is absolutely no truth to this," Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks wrote in an email to POLITICO.