This couldn't have been what Donald Trump had in mind, but his recent bad-mouthing of U.S. prisoners of war has put some steel in the spines of the media and other Republican presidential candidates and generally brought out the best in just about everyone else.

Even the memory of the late George "Bud" Day, war hero, was pulled into the fray. Who would've figured?

Certainly not Trump, who seems to think he can get away with anything.

On Saturday, at a conservative gathering in Iowa, the billionaire bigmouth said Arizona Sen. John McCain — who spent more than five years as a POW in Vietnam — is a war hero only "because he was captured. I like people that weren't captured."

Before Saturday, other GOP presidential hopefuls had tiptoed around Trump's rancid statements, such as his assertion that Mexican immigrants are drug peddlers and rapists. The McCain remark finally woke them up. Condemnation was swift. Rick Perry insisted Trump should exit the race.

Reporters woke up, too. The media once had treated Trump as a sideshow, a mere headline hound. Now they're looking into his business dealings and Vietnam-era draft deferments.

But it was Sen. McCain himself, the target of Trump's wrath, whose comeback was most eloquent.

The senator said Monday the mogul doesn't owe him an apology — but he does owe an apology to America's veterans and their families.

"I'm not a hero," Sen. McCain said, "but those who were my senior ranking officers, people like Col. Bud Day, a congressional Medal of Honor winner, and those that have inspired us to do things that we otherwise wouldn't have been capable of doing, those are the people that I think he owes an apology to."

John McCain may not consider himself a hero but he sure sounds like one. Donald Trump ought to swallow his pride before he chokes on it, then take the senator's advice.

REPRINTED FROM NORTHWEST FLORIDA DAILY NEWS