Defending Troops, Haley Says Golf Course Is Closest Trump Has Come to Combat

Nikki Haley, in the final stretch before the South Carolina primary, is going all in on attacking former President Donald J. Trump, her former boss and chief rival, whom she trails by a huge margin in her home state.

Ms. Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, has used Mr. Trump’s comments over the weekend, about foreign policy and her family, to question his fitness for office, after months of treading lightly on his legal travails and increasing authoritarian rhetoric.

In Elgin, S.C., on Monday, she cast Mr. Trump as disrespectful to military personnel, a threat to national security, and too addled by old age to effectively serve. The harsher approach is central to her argument that the country does not want a rematch between President Biden and Mr. Trump and that she is more electable than the former president in a general election, even as polls show her behind Mr. Trump by over 30 points in South Carolina.

Ms. Haley has used a special counsel report that suggested Mr. Biden struggles with memory problems to argue that the same is true of Mr. Trump, pointing to his conflation of her with Representative Nancy Pelosi of California and his seemingly off-script remarks.

“The special counsel comes out and says he’s mentally diminished,” Ms. Haley said of Mr. Biden, before adding: “That’s not far from Donald Trump.”

She criticized the former president’s comments over the weekend insinuating that her husband, who is deployed to Africa with the National Guard, left the country to escape her. Those remarks, Ms. Haley said on Monday, were insulting to all military personnel, adding, “With that kind of disrespect for the military, he’s not qualified to be the president of the United States, because I don’t trust him to protect