WASHINGTON — Sen. Chris Van Hollen looked at a fight over who should stand at Ground Zero on the 25th anniversary of 9/11 and immediately identified the real victims: Rudy Giuliani’s reputation and “our democracy.”

Giuliani said Mayor Zohran Mamdani should skip the memorial. Families of the dead have been saying the same thing for weeks. More than 100,000 people signed a petition asking organizers to keep Mamdani away, including relatives who buried people in that hole in the ground. Van Hollen’s contribution was to call Giuliani a traitor, declare that Mamdani “champions” democracy, and announce that the former mayor’s comments were a “blatant anti-Muslim diatribe” that must be condemned.

This is the Van Hollen method. A solemn anniversary appears. Somewhere in the pile is a Republican. Therefore, the dead can wait while we run the 2020 greatest hits.

Nobody needed a Maryland senator to explain that Giuliani can be condemned on his own words. Plenty of people already did that. What Van Hollen added was the part where every objection to Mamdani’s record, associations, and rhetoric becomes automatically “anti-Muslim,” and the anniversary of mass murder becomes another chance to sort Americans into traitors and champions.

Some days are for names in bronze and families who still flinch at the sound of a plane. Van Hollen treated those days as unused ad inventory.

The petition did not ask whether Giuliani is pleasant on Newsmax. It asked whether the current mayor of New York should stand in a ceremony built around people murdered by Islamist terrorists, given the company he has kept and the slogans he has danced around. That question can be answered without a lecture on the last presidential election.

Van Hollen answered it anyway. He always does. Point him at a funeral, and he will find a way to mention Trump.

The towers fell 25 years ago. The senator still thinks the main story is who gets the better talking point.