There’s a reason the late Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., is so beloved by elite Washington: He was elite Washington.

President Trump’s harmless remarks against McCain’s record are treated like an antigen. Every national news outlet, Democrat and effete Republican, swarms Trump in hopes of killing whatever foreign thing he’s injecting into the body.

Most people don’t care that Trump has a grudge against McCain, but anyone watching closely understands what’s happening. Washington, led by the national media, is using the memory of McCain to kneecap Trump. It’s why any time CNN talks about it, the on-screen graphic is sure to refer to McCain as a “war hero.”

Guess who else was a war hero? The late Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-S.C. He dropped into France on D-Day to capture Nazis. But you'll hear no praise for the guy who filibustered the Civil Rights Act for more than 20 hours on the Senate floor.

We have many war heroes, and God bless them all, but that’s not what this is about. McCain was Washington’s ideal Republican: He lost two campaigns for president, often bucked his own party, and, most crucially, opposed Trump as an enemy and not just an adversary, ensuring his bitterness would live on by making it known that the president wasn’t invited to his funeral.

Usually when you don’t want someone to attend an event, you don’t send them an invite. McCain sent someone to specifically tell Trump he wasn’t welcome. Who does that?

Trump’s feud with McCain wasn’t even personal until McCain himself made it that way. During the 2016 Republican primary, Trump hadn’t said a word about him until McCain rained contempt on all of Trump’s supporters.

“This performance with our friend out in Phoenix is very hurtful to me,” McCain told New Yorker magazine in July 2015, referring to a recent Trump rally. “Because what he did was he fired up the crazies.”

The crazies. That sounds familiar, almost identical to the “basket of deplorables.” The fact that McCain was eager to say this in the New Yorker tells you everything about who he hoped would see it. See, smart liberals? Don’t you love me even more now?

Only after that gem did Trump mock McCain’s war record, and even then, Trump instantly backtracked.

Trump’s two complaints about McCain in recent days were that the senator tanked the GOP's yearslong efforts to repeal Obamacare and that he lent credibility to the salacious Trump dossier by handing it over to the FBI.

On the first point, former Sen. Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., offered up the worst defense of McCain possible. In an op-ed Thursday for the Washington Post, Lieberman said McCain’s down vote on repeal wasn’t about Trump, but merely a message about bipartisanship. Lieberman wrote that McCain "cast that vote not against repeal of Obamacare but against the partisanship that had taken over the Senate and made it into a feckless, gridlocked, divided place.”

That must feel very good for Washington and all of its spawn, but lawmakers aren’t elected so that they can signal their own virtue with confounding votes. They’re expected to fix problems. McCain was naturally lauded by all of Washington for his vote against repeal. It kept in place the very law that he and the rest of the GOP had attacked for nearly a decade.

On the second point, why wouldn’t Trump resent anyone who had any part in handling that slanderous dossier? British spy Christopher Steele delivered that file of opposition research — mostly funded by Hillary Clinton’s campaign — to McCain, who had one of his senior aides turn it over to the FBI.

Nothing of consequence in the dossier has proven to be true, despite the trail of wreckage in its wake. Several of Trump’s associates have been charged or sentenced to prison with crimes related to bank fraud from years ago, tax evasion from years ago, and lying to the FBI and Congress, a weak process crime. But not a single charge has been tied to Russia and the campaign.

A reporter asked Trump this week about McCain, and Trump replied, “I never was a fan of John McCain, and I never will be.”

CNN: Why the obsession with war hero McCain? He’s dead!

What obsession? Trump was asked a question, and he gave an answer. Otherwise, we'd be hearing endless complaints about stonewalling the press. If there’s a grace period during which you can say nothing about the policy record of dead elected officials, please let me know what it is because a certain Democratic congresswoman just called Ronald Reagan a racist.

Washington isn’t offended that Trump is “attacking” McCain. It’s offended that he’s sandbagging Washington.