Puritan-inspired totalitarian government

‘A Handmaid’s Tale’ crashes up against Trump

In Donald Trump, Margaret Atwood sees an eerie echo of her novels. Activist Stephanie Schriock is fighting to ensure that she’s wrong.

By EDWARD-ISAAC DOVERE

Thirty years ago, writing against the backdrop of Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe, novelist Margaret Atwood called the women in the “The Handmaid’s Tale” who were standing up to the fictional Puritan-inspired totalitarian government “the resistance.” Next week, Stephanie Schriock, the influential president of the women’s political empowerment group EMILY’s List, is preparing to give the organization’s annual award to the Women’s Resistance to President Donald Trump overall.

One of these women is a 77-year-old Canadian feminist poet whose love of fairy tales inspired her to be a writer; the other a seasoned political operative who was rumored to be in the running to be Hillary Clinton’s pick for Democratic National Committee chair if she’d won. One writes dystopian novels about women’s rights being taken away; the other deals in the practical world of fighting to preserve them. Both are deeply opposed to what’s happening in the White House. Both are concerned about the endurance of the pushback.

To Schriock, the 12,000 women who have signed up with EMILY’s List since the election to think about running for office is a reason for optimism. A close supporter of Clinton who advised her throughout the campaign, she was at New York’s Javits Center on Election Night for what was supposed to be the victory party, and since then, she’s been wondering whether the explosion of political activism among women, ironically, has been accelerated by Clinton’s loss in a way that it would not have been had she been elected the first female president.

“Like, was it that Hillary Clinton lost or was it that Donald Trump won? And I think for different women, it was one or the other,” Schriock said. “I don't know the answer. I would have rather have tried it the other way.”

Schriock is encouraged by the number of women who’ve been marching, who’ve been working as attorneys for clients hit by the travel ban, who overwhelmingly made up the callers who swamped congressional office phone lines to complain about Trump’s plans to repeal Obamacare. It’s already changed the work that EMILY’s List—the acronym stands for “early money is like yeast”—is doing out of its headquarters a short walk from the White House, where we spoke for the latest episode of POLITICO’s “Off Message” podcast.

“What we have spent most of those years doing is recruiting and encouraging women to think about running, to just chew on it and we’ll be there,” Schriock said.

But now EMILY’s List is transitioning to helping people figure out how to run, since they don’t seem to need any encouragement: “Some will do it now but some are going to do it in five years and some are going to do it in 10 years. The fact that they have crossed over the barrier of wanting to run from not wanting to run is huge.”

Trump infuriated women’s activists during the campaign because of everything from the accusations of sexual harassment to saying at one point that women who get abortions should be punished. In office, he has moved quickly on some key policy areas: toughening the “Global Gag Rule” on foreign aid going to any abortion-related activities, calling on Congress to ban federal funding for Planned Parenthood and rolling back Obama-era workplace protections for women. And even before all that, women flooded the National Mall in Washington, D.C. to express their collective anger at a brand-new president who during the campaign was caught on tape boasting about his ability to grope women without consequence.

Asked if she thinks the people fighting Trump can keep it up beyond the first few months of the presidency, Schriock says she isn’t sure: “Boy, that is the million-dollar question, right?”

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In “The Handmaid’s Tale,” which is currently being adapted into an original TV series for Hulu, Atwood writes about the Republic of Gilead, a Christian fundamentalist government that takes root in the United States after the assassination of the president and begins by restricting the rights of women. The new government eventually seizes their property and bars them from working, and ultimately becomes a punitive, restrictive Puritan-inspired society where women are either second-class citizens or slaves kept for the sake of breeding—a dystopian imagination based off her worst fears for the trajectory of the early ‘80s.

“I just took people at their word,” she told me in a separate “Off Message” interview, evoking an era when the backlash against the feminist movements of the 1960s and 70s was in full swing in the United States and elsewhere.

Now she’s looking at an American president she compares to “a movie screen on which there is an ambiguous image,” hopeful that nothing like her imagined world could come to pass, but worried about the endurance of the resistance, too.

“Give America credit. It’s very ornery as a country. It’s very diverse, and you have already seen that people are not just going to stay at home for all of these things,” Atwood said. “The danger would be that people get burnt out and tired of watching the whirlygig and trying to figure out what’s going on, and they give up on it.”

But Atwood believes that society could tip into totalitarianism even more quickly than she imagined when writing her famous novel, which charts a total changeover happening within the space of approximately five years.

“More of the people interested in having those kinds of things happen are in power now,” Atwood said. “The moment when you know that things have gone over the edge is the moment when the regime fires into the protest crowd.”

“When these things pivot, they can do it very quickly. Like, really quickly,” said Atwood. “Once the power is achieved, things can be pretty rapid.”

Atwood and actress Elisabeth Moss of “Mad Men” fame, who plays the embattled protagonist Offred, were in Washington last week as part of the promotion tour for the new Hulu series, sitting down at the Hay Adams Hotel, a few blocks from the White House. Moss, wearing a “Je Suis Une Suffragette” T-shirt, recalled looking out the window of her room the night before at the White House and being struck by the beauty of the building and the disconnect between that and her feelings about the current occupant, whom she called “infuriating.”

Like the character she plays, Moss said, “I feel like we’re in a situation of trying to grab at the truth, and trying to grab at the facts, and trying to understand what’s happening, as well, as best we can.”

Moss thought back to filming on Election Day and the day after. She was upset at Trump’s victory, and that was in her head as they shot a scene with one of the famous lines from the book, “Don’t let the bastards grind you down,” and another about how some inevitably suffer as the world is revamped.

I asked Moss if her feelings about the presidential election informed her acting choices on those days, and afterward.

“I don’t know if it changes them,” Moss said. “Maybe it deepens them or makes them more personal, you know. Hopefully I would have done the same thing anyways, but I think that it can’t help but make them feel a little bit more personal.”

“You can’t help but come to a place like D.C. and look at the White House and think about the last time you thought about the White House, or D.C.,” or Moss added, going on to compare that to Atwood’s imagined massacre of Congress and suspension of the Constitution that precipitates the government overthrow, “what happens to D.C. in the book.”

As for reality, Schriock says she doesn’t see any reason to expect Trump will become acceptable to her, or to anyone who cares about women’s issues the way she does.

“It feels like pushing women aside and that's got to start at the top and Donald Trump seems to have no interest in that whatsoever,” Schriock said.

Nor is she comforted by the presence of first daughter and senior White House adviser Ivanka Trump, who has said women’s issues are a priority for her.

“As far as I’m concerned, she’s a part of the—an administration that is pushing a bad health-care bill that is going to strip insurance away from 24 million. It’s going to defund Planned Parenthood,” Schriock said.

As for Trump agreeing to send his daughter to Germany for a meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel this week, Schriock said she finds that insulting: “Does he not think of Merkel as an equal?”

Given how strange and awful she finds Trump, I asked Atwood whether she found it more surreal walking around actual Washington with him as president, or walking onto a fully realized set for a world she fearfully imagined so long ago (and even having a brief cameo, as an enforcer who slaps Moss’s character at one point).

“The world always has been quite weird. It’s just that we took for granted in certain parts of this country that there was a normality, and that that was normality. And that rights were inalienable. I don’t know where anybody ever got that idea, because they didn’t come down out of a cloud. They were thought up and fought for by people. That’s where rights come from,” Atwood said.

Thinking about the current moment, Atwood invoked the character from “The Handmaid’s Tale” who’s tasked with beating the new world order into Moss’s character and the other women.

“That’s how they get taken away. People take them away. So, what is normal and how much can we count on it? And our idea of what is normal changes a lot, depending on the circumstances,” she said. “So, when Aunt Lydia says, ‘This may not seem normal to you now,’ it’s very scary. What is going to be the new normal?”