The disturbing trend transforming The Handmaid’s Tale into reality

People listen to US President Donald Trump as he delivers a speech during a campaign rally at F&M Bank Arena in Clarksville, Tennessee, October 10, 2026.

Full disclosure: When I discuss "The Handmaid's Tale," I'm describing the 2017-2025 TV series and not the 1985 novel. While I immensely respect Margaret Atwood both as an artist and as a political/social critic, I confess that reading "The Handmaid's Tale" remains on my bucket list.

Yet none of this means I can't effectively describe how "The Handmaid's Tale" is relevant to the present: While I can't determine if the TV series is better than book, I join millions who only saw the former in saying it makes recognize just how disturbingly it foresaw President Donald Trump's America.

First, there is the misogyny, one that does not spare even women who back Trump. Thanks to Trump's policies, women have lost the constitutional right to an abortion, found it harder to seek protections from harassment and abuse at the workplace and making it harder for low-income families to receive reproductive and cancer-related health care. The premise of "The Handmaid's Tale also strikes a chord for another, more scientifically inescapable reason. Even though Trump supporters urge increased procreation to address falling fertility rates, they refuse to accept that the president's opposition to environmental regulations is precisely why sperm counts are dropping in the first place. From pesticides to plastic pollution, corporations dump chemicals known as "endocrine disruptors" into our ecosystem, so much so that every human being alive has at least a handful of microplastics and pesticide chemicals in their bodies.

Is it that much of a stretch to see the leaps from this political movement and set of environmental circumstances, and the plight of the women in Gilead?

Show creator and executive producer Bruce Miller has openly acknowledged that the TV show leans into themes about humans being irresponsible with our scientific knowledge.

"The background noise of the book is all the things we’re talking about now," Miller told Variety in 2020. "They’re functions of climate change. We’re seeing diseases that are a condition of climate change and lack of sustainability. COVID is an example of that. In the book, it’s a plague of sexually transmitted diseases. The shifting foundation of the environment is very much underneath what’s happening in Gilead."

Of course, in "The Handmaid's Tale," the same misogynists who brutalized and controlled women in order to address their fertility crisis at least understood that plastic and pesticide pollution, climate change and other unsustainable environmental practices are dangerous. In the Trump world, the misogynists refuse to stop the use of chemicals destroying our species' collective sperm count.

"Gilead is a counterpoint to what else is going on," Miller said. "One of the things we try to show is that Gilead often has noble goals even though they have absolutely horrendous ways of trying to reach them. They’d like to clean up the environment. They believe that from a religious point of view, the earth is a gift from God. A lot of the show is about how Gilead has made progress in sustainability. Almost all the cars are hybrid in Gilead. That means for us that road noise in the sound mix is much lower because those cars are quieter. … Every year we try to add a few more birds to the mix of bird sounds on the show. Bird populations that had been suppressed would be starting to come back in Gilead. You want the birds to sound like what it would if the earth was a little more sustainable."

He concluded, "What we’re showing in Gilead is a fascist totalitarian reaction to a real problem."

In short, we may be headed toward a future like "The Handmaid's Tale," but worse.

From Your Site Articles