An old man in a hurry

Trump races the clock

In 1886, Lord Randolph Churchill spoke out against the new Liberal government’s support for home rule in Ireland.

The witty and reckless Conservative politician, who was the father of Winston Churchill, issued a scathing attack on U.K. Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone.

The home rule proposal was a “conspiracy against the honour of Britain and the welfare of Ireland,” he charged. It was “a monstrous mixture of imbecility, extravagance, and political hysterics.” It was a “farrago of superlative nonsense.”

“All useful and desired reforms are to be indefinitely postponed, the British constitution is to be torn up, the Liberal Party shivered into fragments.”

“And why? For this reason and no other: to gratify the ambition of an old man in a hurry.”

Lord Randolph Churchill (British Museum)

Trump’s hurry

If that sour description of the 76-year-old Gladstone was apt, perhaps it applies even more fully to President Donald Trump. Since taking office January 20, the 78-year-old has been in a hurr…