TORONTO — This is how a war on women ramps up: First, their bank accounts are frozen, and then they’re forbidden to work. Protesters gather, waving signs and chanting. Then, in this flashback scene from the first episode of the new Hulu series “The Handmaid’s Tale,” the police open fire on the demonstrators. Bloodied bodies fall, and the camera holds tight on the story’s heroine, Offred, played by Elisabeth Moss, whose disbelieving face seems to ask, What world is this?

Based on Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel, the series tells the story of a country reinvented: A violent religious coup has turned the United States into Gilead, a theocracy where women have been stripped of their rights and the more fertile conscripted into “handmaids,” forced to bear children for the elite. Though the protest scene was filmed last fall, and, like the series itself, conceived long before a dizzying election season and aftermath that have catapulted Ms. Atwood’s book up the Amazon best-seller list, the television adaptation arrives with a newfound and unexpected resonance in Trump’s America.

Before the series even debuts on Wednesday, April 26, references to “The Handmaid’s Tale” — shorthand for repressive patriarchy — seem ubiquitous. A photo of a group of male Republicans at the White House debating maternity services with nary a woman in sight earned the social media hashtag #Gilead. Last month, women in Handmaids’ red dresses and bonnets sat side-by-side in the Texas State Capitol to protest anti-abortion measures under consideration.

“We thought about it in a different way,” said Samira Wiley (“Orange Is the New Black”), who plays Moira, Offred’s best friend, referring to the cast and crew’s changed relationship to the show since the election. “Suddenly it was dangerously close to the climate that we were starting to live in. We were hoping to be relevant, but we weren’t hoping it would be this relevant.”