“The Handmaid’s Tale” came out near the end of the Cold War, and Atwood has said she was inspired by mid-20th-century works of anti-totalitarian speculative fiction like “1984” and Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451.” These books depict closed, airless societies, where despots control access to information, which is charged with tremendous importance. In “1984,” history has been obliterated. In “Fahrenheit 451,” all books are banned, while in “The Handmaid’s Tale” reading is illegal for (most) women. The regimes in these books are smothering and all-encompassing, but facts could, at least theoretically, endanger them.

For a long time, the notion that truth threatens totalitarianism was taken for granted. In the Soviet Union, the regime jammed foreign radio broadcasts, and people risked prison to pass around forbidden books. “Living within the lie can constitute the system only if it is universal,” wrote Vaclav Havel in 1978, a decade before he became the first post-Communist president of what was then Czechoslovakia. He continued: “There are no terms whatsoever on which it can coexist with living within the truth, and therefore everyone who steps out of line denies it in principle and threatens it in its entirety.”

This is the case in Gilead, and it’s what gives words their salvific potential. The heroine of “The Handmaid’s Tale” describes herself as “ravenous for news,” and is sustained by the mock Latin phrase “Nolite te bastardes carborundorum,” which translates to “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.” It is scratched, presumably by one of her predecessors, on the floor of the closet in the room where she sleeps. (This phrase has since become totemic, reproduced on T-shirts and in tattoos, necklaces and needlepoint.)

Words are even more important in “The Testaments.” (If you don’t want spoilers, you should stop reading now.) One of the book’s great surprises is that the seemingly fanatical Aunt Lydia is actually Part of the Resistance Inside the Gilead Administration, and she does a better job of it than the anonymous Trump official who wrote the New York Times Op-Ed essay. An opportunist rather than a true believer, she joined the new regime to avoid being killed by it, and though she’s complicit in its crimes, she helps take it down by publishing its secrets.

Like “The Handmaid’s Tale,” “The Testaments” has a coda set far in the future, at a Gileadean studies academic symposium. The information released by Aunt Lydia, a scholar says, “touched off the so-called Ba’al Purge that thinned the ranks of the elite class, weakened the regime, and instigated a military putsch as well as a popular revolt.” It’s this that makes “The Testaments” feel so optimistic. Imagine: a world where exposing the misdeeds of a regime could unravel it!

That’s been a constant hope of the Trump years. Those who abhor him have dreamed of seeing his depravity and corruption proven in a way that can’t be denied, whether with the fabled pee tape, the Mueller report or rumored outtakes from “The Apprentice” where he’s said to spout racial slurs. Yet again and again, Trump’s depravity and corruption are proven in a way that can’t be denied, and it doesn’t matter.

We’ve all heard him boasting of sexual assault on tape. The Mueller report found that the Trump campaign “expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts.” A Times investigation documented abundant evidence of tax fraud by Trump, and showed that he owes much of his wealth to his father. Prosecutors said he directed hush money payments to a pornographic film actress and a former Playboy model, campaign finance crimes that helped land his former attorney in prison. You don’t need a secret recording to prove the president is a racist; the evidence is on Twitter.