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.

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“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.