When the American comedian Michelle Wolf launched her blitzkrieg on the Trump administration at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in April, few emerged unscathed, least of all the president. But Wolf made a special target of Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, sitting a few seats away from her on stage. “I have to say I’m a little star-struck: I loved you as Aunt Lydia in The Handmaid’s Tale,” Wolf cooed, to the sound of hundreds of journalists holding their breath. “Mike Pence,” she said, addressing the vice president, “if you haven’t seen it, you would love it.”
It would probably have been more surprising if the evening had passed without a reference to Margaret Atwood’s dystopia: the age of Trump seems to have become the age of Atwood. The television adaptation of her 1985 novel about women-hating Christian fundamentalists taking over the US, broadcast here on Channel 4 and now in its second series, has become a lightning rod for the #MeToo movement and millennial anti-Trump sentiment.