The Frame In the winter of 2026, as President Donald Trump prepared to deliver the eulogy at the Capitol’s rotunda, the nation gathered not merely to mourn a senator but to witness the symbolic end of an era. Graham’s funeral, staged against the marble backdrop of the very institution where he spent three decades, encapsulated the tension between personal legacy and the broader disintegration of the consensus that had guided United States foreign policy since the Cold War’s end. The ceremony occurred at a moment when the Trump administration was simultaneously confronting a reshaped NATO, a rising China, and a domestic political landscape that had fractured along generational and ideological lines, making Graham’s passing a barometer of the health of the nation’s institutional architecture. The Signal While news outlets highlighted Graham’s swashbuckling laugh and his penchant for mingling with Capitol waitstaff, the deeper narrative lies in his role as the last prominent bridge...