Some delays are blessings. Take the sixth season of The Handmaid’s Tale, which, due to the Hollywood strikes, was pushed to 2025. The first season came out in 2017, mere months into Trump’s first term, and the parallels between Atwood’s celebrated novel (40 years old this year!) and the faithfully adapted series with Trump’s presidency were undeniable. So there’s fitting symmetry to the final season coinciding with Trump triumphant return to the White House with a more aggressive, Gilead-style administration.
Now, those on the right would probably decry as alarmist and “woke” any comparison between today’s America with Gilead, the ultraconservative, theocratic regime in the series. True, Trump hasn’t (yet) signed any Executive Orders criminalising reading or outlawing women from working. But the news headlines from America these days sound frighteningly similar to the horrors that the Hulu series imagined across its six seasons.
I’ve got receipts. So here are just a few examples of how America is swinging perilously towards Gilead.
Project 2025: Initially, when Trump was running for office the second time, he disavowed any connection to Project 2025, which was a call to action that was drafted by the right-wing Heritage Foundation. One of its aims was to restore the traditional, nuclear family as the cherished ideal for American life. This means promoting “healthy marriages” which, by definition, excludes, even delegitimises, other family structures like single and same-sex parents.
Project 2025 reads like a blueprint Gilead’s Commanders would’ve used to justify overthrowing a democratically elected government. Just as Trump’s been busy dismantling and discrediting every government arm. Still, the blame doesn’t all fall on him. The novel and series show how the collapse of liberal democracy comes with the general population growing so apathetic that they’d support burning the current system down. Considering how Trump won the popular vote in 2024, at least half the population want his vision of America.
Zombie Pregnancy: One of the most morbid events from Season 3 of The Handmaid’s Tale was when the black handmaid, Natalie, gets shot. The only reason she receives any medical attention is because she’s pregnant. Though Natalie is braindead, she’s still a “holy vessel,” so she’s kept alive until the baby’s full term.
Earlier this year, Adriana Smith, an African-American woman from Georgia, was declared brain-dead at nine weeks pregnant. Under Georgia’s LIFE Act, Adriana was kept on life support against her family’s will. Like Natalie, Adriana was only allowed by the state to die once she’d served her biological destiny of giving birth.
The Tradwife: Remember when Trump promised that he’d protect women, “whether they liked it or not?” Well, Aunty Lydia did say that there are two kinds of freedoms: “freedom to and freedom from.” What Gilead and Trump would offer women is freedom from – everything, it seems. Take the Hulu series’ most fascinating character, Serena Joy/Waterford/Wharton. Pre-Gilead, Serena controversially championed domestic feminism. She genuinely believed that by embracing traditional values and taking their place in the home, women could save the world.
Serena got everything she wanted, and became as much the oppressor as the oppressed. In a stroke of brilliance, the series made Serena young, unlike her original book incarnation. But would any young, modern woman really want these things? Well, take influencer Estee Williams, who went viral on TikTok for showcasing 1950s-style traditional homemaking as an aspirational choice. The tradwife is a reactionary countermeasure to the perceived threats posed to the family and society by career-driven women.
While Season 6 of The Handmaid’s Tale often felt more like a filler season for the upcoming spinoff The Testaments, the final season returns at a critical time. June Osborne/Offred reminds us that only by fighting the good fight, even in the bleakest of times, can freedom survive and win. Before Trump, I thought that Atwood was overly optimistic in her belief that oppressive tyrannies must fall. But Atwood partly wrote her novel while living in West Berlin. Just four years after the book was published in 1985, the Berlin Wall fell. So there’s hope for America’s recovery.
Atwood’s prescience comes by reading the past. She famously said that nothing in The Handmaid’s Tale didn’t happen to someone, somewhere, in history. The novel and TV series so accurately foresaw today’s political environment in the West because Atwood keeps her eyes open. As June says, “I was asleep before. That’s how we let it happen.” The only way to prevent the rise of ultraconservative extremism is to be politically awake. Sleep, and we might soon find ourselves under His eye.
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