The secret candidate who Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol is hoping will launch an independent presidential campaign to counter Donald Trump's takeover of the Republican Party is David French, a conservative lawyer who writes for the National Review, according to Bloomberg Politics.

Kristol triggered a Twitter trend and a cable news mania Sunday when he tweeted that there would be "impressive" independent candidate "with a strong team and a real chance" emerging.

Just a heads up over this holiday weekend: There will be an independent candidate--an impressive one, with a strong team and a real chance.

-- Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) May 29, 2016

Bloomberg cites "two Republicans intimately familiar" with Kristol's efforts to recruit a conservative counter-candidate to stop Trump as saying "the person Kristol has in mind is David French."

French has an impressive resume' as an Iraq War veteran and author of New York Times bestseller "Rise of ISIS: A Threat We Can't Ignore." French is a household name, as in french fries, french dressing and french kissing, but can not as in David French. How could he expect to get any political oxygen when Trump and Hillary Clinton are dominating the news cycles this fall? But stranger things have happened already this political cycle.