I’m a legal alien in New York. I promise I won’t eat your dog

I’ll admit, it’s been hard to look a dog in the eye in New York in the last few days without pondering: “Poached or roasted?” The Fishbridge dog park (actually a large slab of concrete) in the shadows of the Brooklyn Bridge in Manhattan, usually a haven for playspace-deprived pets and their masochistic owners, is suddenly heaving with culinary possibilities.

As an Australian blow-in to this great country (about three decades ago), I felt compelled to reflect on my dietary preferences and the welfare of my chocolate labrador, Moose, after Donald Trump revealed immigrants were dining on Americans’ pets. “They’re eating the dogs … they’re eating the cats,” he said during the presidential debate with Kamala Harris this week.

This is my Moose, not the kind you eat.

You can dismiss Trump’s accusation as being cumbersome political hackery or “just another” racist trope, but remember, we Australians shamelessly eat something as unspeakable as a Chiko Roll. If we’re prepared to do that, what else are foreigners capable of?

Yet, as proud pet owners, we cannot be intimidated. We can’t let the heartless, hungry hordes win! And as a migrant, it’s important I get out and show Americans we can be trusted around domestic animals and some humans.

I know my neighbours and friends at the dog park weren’t expecting me to stick the fangs into Fido when I got the guts to venture out with my beloved pet, running the gauntlet of salivating illegals, for a midday romp with the canine crew at Fishbridge. However, they were open to speculating on who would make good eating. We’re looking at you and your 41 kilograms, Moose.

Of course, New York isn’t representative of the America that the former president is intent on terrifying for political gain. For a start, just about everybody, it seems, is an immigrant in Gotham, and you have to do something far more gruesome than chewing on a Chihuahua to make a mark in this town.

Unfortunately, the laughter at Fishbridge and around the world about Trump’s comments might camouflage the fact that groups of often desperately poor would-be immigrants have real concerns about how they are perceived, received and treated in America.

It also masks the fact that batshit crazy accusations do work in this sadly divided country. Colleagues and friends from all sides of politics have been giggling and guffawing at Trump since 2015, but he’s still close to a 50/50 chance of being president again. Even after he delivered his unrepentant, unhinged, lying masterclass in the debate, the presidential polls barely moved.

At some stage, you might speculate, Trump will finally say one thing (or a clump of things) too outrageous, too conspicuously false, even for his bafflingly loyal base of support. But that ignores the depth and impact of grievance politics. In parts of the US – key parts, where presidential campaigns are won and lost – many people are angry and scared about their futures and change in their communities. While many Republicans fret that their party’s nominee doesn’t stick to talking perceptively about policy, Trump knows his best shot at campaign success is to doom-ride the country.

“We’re a failing nation,” he said, feeding grievance between demonstrably false claims about rising crime rates, an immigrant crime wave, being robbed of victory in the last election, Democrats killing babies, and his opponents inflicting the “highest ever” inflation on America. For significant slabs of the country, it doesn’t matter that he lies without compunction. What is important is that amid the tsunami of falsehoods, he tells the right lies.

If you were an alien – a real one from outer space, not the 21 million of them pouring over the border, according to the former president – you might fly in, take a look at the state of US politics, and wish you never left your gaseous, barren, god-awful planet.

But that would be a mistake. Tens of millions of Americans, of all political stripes, recognise the apparent insanity that influences the perception of their nation, and they want it to change. Demographic shifts make it likely some of the nonsense being blurted by ageing America won’t get as great a hearing in the future.

Unfortunately, though, the structural peculiarities of the American electoral system, among other things, make it likely that in the November election, at least, extreme rhetoric and bald-faced lies could play a decisive role in establishing who becomes the leader of the free world.

It may come down to swing voters – a small sliver of the electorate, hopefully with a sense of humour – deciding whether the United States gets another four years of interminable lie-strewn bluster on the political stage. Fingers crossed that when these voters sit down and contemplate the challenges the country faces and which way they’ll lean, they won’t be thinking: “Well, there is that illegals-eating-pets thing to consider.”

Greg Truman is a New York-based Australian writer. His book Out of the Blue with the Wiggles’ Anthony Field will be released on October 29 by Allen and Unwin.