A column published by Alternet argues that "The Handmaid's Tale" — the 2017–2025 television series rather than Margaret Atwood's 1985 novel — offers a disturbingly precise preview of the United States under President Donald Trump. In the show, the United States has been replaced by Gilead, a totalitarian regime that responds to a fertility crisis by forcing fertile women into reproductive servitude. Because the series aired from 2017 to 2025 — overlapping the Trump presidency rather than predating it, as the novel does — the column treats its parallels as commentary on current events rather than retrofitted prophecy. The author, who concedes that Atwood's novel remains on their reading bucket list despite an immense respect for the writer as both an artist and a political and social critic, joins the millions who watched only the series in finding that it foresaw Trump's America with unsettling accuracy.

The first point of overlap, according to the column, is misogyny — a phenomenon that, in the author's view, spares not even women who back Trump. Thanks to Trump's policies, the author writes, women have lost the constitutional right to an abortion, have found it harder to seek protections from harassment and abuse at the workplace, and have seen it become more difficult for low-income families to receive reproductive and cancer-related health care.

The premise of "The Handmaid's Tale" strikes a chord for another, more scientifically inescapable reason as well. Although Trump supporters urge increased procreation to address falling fertility rates, the column contends that 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 the ecosystem to such an extent that every human being alive carries at least a handful of microplastics and pesticide chemicals in their bodies. Is it that much of a stretch, the author asks, to draw a line from this political movement and set of environmental circumstances to the plight of the women of Gilead?

Bruce Miller, the show's creator and executive producer, has openly acknowledged that the series leans into themes about human beings acting irresponsibly with 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.” His remarks came in 2020, while the series was still mid-run — evidence that the environmental framing was built into the show rather than read into it afterward.

The column points to an ironic contrast here. In "The Handmaid's Tale," the 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 author argues, the misogynists refuse to stop the use of chemicals destroying the 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.”

The column's conclusion is blunt: the world may be headed toward a future like "The Handmaid's Tale" — only worse. What remains to be seen, on the terms Miller laid out, is whether real ecological strain gets answered with sustainability — or with the kind of "fascist totalitarian reaction to a real problem" he says Gilead represents.