Haley calls Trump ‘unhinged’: ‘An unhinged president is an unsafe president’

Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley called former President Trump “unhinged” Tuesday and said, if Trump continues to attack U.S. service members, he doesn’t “deserve to be president” — responding, in part, to his recent comments about her husband, who is deployed overseas.

“When he leaves the teleprompter, he is unhinged,” Haley said of Trump in an interview on the “Hugh Hewitt Show.”

“And everybody can say whatever they want to say, in terms of, ‘Oh, he was a great president.’”

But, she continued, “an unhinged president is an unsafe president. And if you’ll go talk about those men and women who served us, you don’t deserve to be president.”

Trump, at a rally in South Carolina over the weekend, went after Haley’s husband, Maj. Michael Haley, who is serving abroad with the South Carolina Army National Guard on a yearlong mission in the Horn of Africa. He is deployed as a staff officer with the 218th Maneuver Enhancement Brigade.

Trump asked the audience why Haley’s husband is not with her on the campaign trail.

“What happened to her husband?” Trump said at the campaign event. “Where is he? He’s gone. He knew. He knew.”

Haley has used the attack from Trump as an opportunity to remind voters of Trump’s controversial past comments about military service members and veterans. She did so again in the Hewitt interview, calling the former president’s recent attack evidence of a “pattern.”

“This is about every military family who sacrifices and knows what it’s like to have their loved one deployed. And this is about a pattern of Donald Trump. I mean, he has said this before where he calls military members suckers or losers. We know that when he was at Arlington Cemetery, he said, ‘What was in it for them?’ He has never even been close to a military uniform.”

“And for him to go and mock my husband or any of our men and women in the military, it shows how disconnected he is from the sacrifice, and what these men and women do every day not because they care for themselves, not because they do it for fun, but because they know that freedom isn’t free. And they’re willing to shed blood for it. And the idea that he’ll go and make light of something like this is exactly the reason we continue to have problems with him,” she continued.

In an earlier statement to The Hill, Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said there “has been no bigger fighter for our military men and women than President Trump.”

“Nikki Haley likes to talk about her foreign policy chops, but bowing down to China and advocating for forever wars by sending our troops into unnecessary conflicts represent America Last policies she is so fond of,” Cheung continued.