Trump doesn’t shock us any more, and that’s shocking

In terms of moral injury, it was by no means the worst Donald Trump has perpetrated.

It was not even the worst such harm he has done to women, either personally (in 2023 a jury found him liable for sexual abuse and forcible touching against writer E. Jean Carroll in 1996; he has otherwise been accused of misconduct, including sexual assault, by about 18 women – all accusations Trump has denied), or generally: “When you’re a star they let you do it … grab them by the pussy, you can do anything,” he told Access Hollywood in 2016.

And that’s not even getting into the ways in which the Trump administration has harmed American women in a material sense, through policy and funding cuts.

They include restriction of access and funding to safe abortion care, and eliminating the White House Gender Policy Council – something considered so important Trump did it in his first week of office.

We have become so inured to Trump’s personal misogyny and the generalised misogyny of his administration – Vice President JD Vance’s comments about “childless cat ladies”, say, or Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth’s endorsement of Christian nationalist pastor Doug Wilson, who says that “unsubmissive women are a truly destructive force” – that we are not even outraged by it any more.

So when Trump gave a truly bonkers press conference this week about autism, and told pregnant women they should suck up their physical pain instead of taking a perfectly safe pill for it because he asserts that pill may cause autism, it was difficult to muster much beyond resigned irritation.

In a triumph of political mansplaining, Trump was joined by other besuited men – Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jnr and federal Centres for Medicare & Medicaid Services head Mehmet Oz.

The president announced that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) would update its drug labelling to discourage the use of Tylenol (the painkiller Australians know as paracetamol) by pregnant women.

The authority will also enable the use of leucovorin, a form of vitamin B, as a treatment for autism, despite it being unproven as an effective treatment.

“Taking Tylenol is not good. It’s not good … Don’t take Tylenol,” Trump repeatedly said. “Just don’t take it unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

The world’s most powerful man also said, wrongly, that there was “no downside” for pregnant women to resist taking the painkiller – one of the few that is safe for women in pregnancy, and that can control fever, which can be harmful to the unborn baby.

Trump urged women to “fight like hell” not to take the drug, and to “tough it out” instead, in which case, “nothing bad can happen, it can only good happen [sic]”.

It was an outrage, but it was difficult to summon outrage because outrage depends on a level of novelty or extraordinariness. Trump and his cronies have made such perversions of science commonplace.

And as for the idea that women should subordinate their needs to those of their family/the common good/the American way of life? Well, that is fast becoming a central pillar of his authoritarianism.

Pro-natalism, and the central role of women as reproductive engines, has been a centrepiece of nationalism throughout history. But where is our outrage?

During the first Trump administration, it was normal for Australians to wake up, check their phones, and feel shock and indignation at whatever Trump had said or perpetrated overnight.

Now, during his second stint in office, the atmosphere is markedly different.

We still check our phones, but we have to steel ourselves first, and when we look, it is with dread and resignation. Who knows what world and/or life-altering event has taken place while we slept? Do we even want to know?

The fatigue is grounded in good reason. This week alone Trump has lambasted allies in a fiery UN speech; made his pregnancy-pain comments; called climate change a “con”; seemingly reversed course on Ukraine and said the US will continue to fund that country’s war effort; succeeded in the litigious persecution of one of his chief enemies, former FBI director James B Comey; and threatened the arrest of whoever was responsible for the malfunction of an escalator at the United Nations headquarters.

This is not an exhaustive list.

Our malaise, or resigned paralysis, seems to have emboldened our political leaders to go as far as they can to appease or cosy up to Trump, without endorsing the parts of his agenda they find particularly icky.

In the opinion of Californian Governor Gavin Newsom – a Democrat who is emerging as Trump’s main political opposition right now – the sycophancy is embarrassing.

“I’m pretty embarrassed by how complicit so many countries have been in aiding and abetting Trump and Trumpism,” Newsom told my colleague Peter Hartcher last week. “I’m pretty disgusted by it, to be candid with you … I’ve talked to these leaders. They know what they’re doing.”

Newsom did not mention our Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who this week posted on his social media a cosy selfie with the president.

For months, the Australian media and the opposition have criticised Albanese’s inability to secure a meeting with Trump.

Along with the selfie, the long-awaited meeting was finally announced – it will take place on October 20 at the White House.

Of course, travelling to Washington to meet the US president is a perfectly proper and normal thing for an Australian prime minister to do. If the president himself is neither proper nor normal, then it is hardly the fault of his allies.

It doesn’t constitute a reason for his allies to shun him, or to abandon decades of diplomatic protocol, even if the president himself shows no respect for such conventions.

But at what point does allyship become the complicity that Newsom talks about? When does it become “embarrassing”, or worse, to stand next to the naked emperor and pretend he’s wearing clothes?

Jacqueline Maley is a columnist and author.

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