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 hurry to remake Washington. (Trump, of course, is pushing in the opposite direction than Gladstone, who was a classic liberal.)

The new Trump administration froze billions in federal payments before backing off. It has offered millions of federal employees an incentive to quit if they’re reluctant to return to the office fulltime and support Trump’s agenda. Trump signed executive orders on immigration, DEI, energy, foreign aid, the environment, trade, health, retribution against Trump’s perceived foes and much more.

As Peter Baker wrote in the New York Times:

In his first eight days in office, Mr. Trump mounted a lightning blitz against the federal government that has the nation’s capital in an uproar. He has moved quickly and aggressively to eliminate pockets of resistance in what he calls “the deep state” and put his own stamp on far-flung corners of the bureaucracy.

It has been a campaign of breathtaking scope and relentless velocity, one unlike any new president has tried in modern times. It has been a blend of personal and political as he seeks revenge against those who investigated him or his allies, while simultaneously demolishing the foundations of the modern liberal state and asserting more control than he or any of his predecessors had in the past.

By conventional standards, Trump has to race the clock to expend his political capital before it runs out at the midterm elections in 2026. Traditionally voters have rebuked presidents in the midterms, with their parties losing seats in Congress.

But unless and until his hold on the Republican party cracks, Trump could envision retaining a commanding role beyond the two years. One Republican congressman has proposed repealing the 22^nd Amendment’s two-term limit for presidents, a provision that was added to the constitution by Republicans wanting to make sure there could never be another three or even four-term presidency like Franklin D. Roosevelt’s.

Other Republicans have suggested Trump could run in 2028 for vice president with J.D. Vance as the presidential candidate. That smacks uncomfortably of the job switch Russian President Vladimir Putin did when he ran into a presidential term limit. Putin became Russian Prime Minister while Medvedev kept the presidential seat warm for him.

Official photo of President Donald Trump (White House photo by Daniel Torok)

Gladstone’s crusades

William Gladstone (Photo: London Stereoscopic Company)

When the ferociously energetic Gladstone made Irish home rule his cause in 1886, he was at the beginning of his third (out of four) stints as prime minister.

The ”old man in a hurry” concept recognizes the toll that age and illness can take. But while Gladstone’s third government lasted only five months, he came back as prime minister in 1892 and finally resigned in 1894, at the age of 84. He died of cancer in 1898.

Known as the “grand old man” of British politics, Gladstone was a singular figure. He “was always seeking relief for a state of chronic mental tension by immersing himself in work which possessed him completely,” wrote one of his biographers, Phillip Magnus. “There was no subject which appealed to him so much as the cause of the oppressed.”

As a student at Oxford he considered a career in the church, writing in his diary, “God direct me. I am blind.” His father suggested the law would be more suitable, and Gladstone’s outstanding performance in debate at the Oxford Union led to an offer of a seat in Parliament.

But he wasn’t like other politicians. He saw politics as a means to an end; he wanted it to “conform with the highest Christian ethic,” according to Magnus.

From his early adulthood into his 80s, Gladstone would “patrol the London streets after nightfall with the object of rescuing and rehabilitating prostitutes,” wrote Magnus. He donated generously to rescue homes and to individual women.

Gladstone suggested to the women that they “should accompany him home, where he told them that they would be treated with respect by his wife and by himself, and that they would be given food and shelter…Many of the police knew what he was doing; and it is to be feared that some of them misconstrued his purpose...there was an ever-present risk that a scandal might be written-up and blazoned in the gutter Press. But Gladstone went serenely on his way.”

Irish home rule

Gladstone makes the case for Irish home rule in the UK Parliament, 1886.

Gladstone supported national movements in Italy and the Balkans and believed that the same rules should apply to his own nation, the United Kingdom. It was only right that the Irish people should have their own parliament.

In the summer of 1885, “Gladstone finally made-up his mind to fight the cause of Irish home rule during a brief holiday which he took in the Norwegian fjords on Sir Thomas Brassey's yacht, the Sunbeam,” Magnus wrote.

“Gladstone found in Norway a small people living happily in a spirit of democracy and … it touched one of the deepest chords in his nature.”

Gladstone was unable to amass the votes in Parliament for Irish home rule either in 1886 or in a second attempt in 1893. Ireland would have to wait until the early 1920s to achieve a form of self-government, and that only came after a war with the British.

The fight for Ireland’s independence was a just cause, after centuries of England’s exploitation of the Irish people.

But even a formidable “old man in a hurry” couldn’t bring it about.