I try to stay optimistic that our institutions, our democracy and our American mixing-bowl experiment are all going to survive the current stress test they're undergoing.

But lately I've been having serious doubts. The reason is because I am originally from Springfield, Ohio.

Yes, that Springfield — the one that's suddenly been slandered as the "pet-eating city."

It's surreal to see places where you grew up, like the college where your dad taught for decades, getting evacuated by bomb threats that were triggered out of nothing other than repeated fabrications from a leading presidential candidate.

At first, I reacted with bemused disbelief. As in: Did Donald Trump really just accuse my former hometown of eating household pets? It seemed too ridiculous to take seriously.

One of the many reporters who descended on Springfield described what he wrote as "a pretty long story about a thing that didn't happen."

But disbelief is part of the problem. Because the fake has a way of becoming real.

When the governor of Ohio revealed Monday that the faded factory town of 58,000 had gotten an extraordinary 33 bomb threats, forcing it to close schools, hospitals and street fairs, whatever disbelief I had gave way to anger.

The kicker was when the GOP vice presidential candidate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, admitted he knew the pet-eating slur aimed at Springfield's Haitian immigrants wasn't true. It didn't matter, he said, because it drew focus to the immigration problem.

"If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm going to do," he said.

What are we doing? Does what's real no longer matter, not even a tiny bit?

Denigrating immigrants is sadly an American tradition. In Springfield a century ago it was the Germans and the Irish who got the side-eye. The pet story is so toxic because it's perfectly crafted to whip up the worst sorts of prejudice. Even if it fades, though, it will remain unnerving because it was so boldly fake and cynically used.

Most unsettling of all is that a majority of Republicans believed it anyway.

The polling outfit YouGov this past week asked Americans about various statements made recently by top politicians. One question was: "Do you think the following statement is true or false ... that Haitian immigrants are abducting and eating pet dogs and cats?"

By 52% to 25%, Trump voters said they believe it's true or probably true. (The rest said they weren't sure.) Voters backing Democrat Kamala Harris said it was false by 88% to 4%. The Republican governor of Ohio, by the way, said that Trump's statement was not only false but was "a piece of garbage."

"From Day One of his presidency to this day, Donald Trump has promoted an alternate reality that has caught on with a shocking proportion of his base," The Washington Post summed up the poll.

By 43% to 40%, Trump backers said they also believed his absurd claim that in some states they execute babies after they're born. And by 75% to 25%, Trump voters said they still think that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

Do they really believe these things? Or are they just saying they do, out of partisan allegiance, a sense of team building?

Either way, the pet-eating saga is so off the rails I'm wondering how we're going to find our way back on track. It feels like the rules have changed. All politicians fib and hype and sand away the truth's hard edges. But this stuff is alternate reality demagoguery.

My dad still lives in the next town over from Springfield, 8 miles away, where we moved when I was a kid. One of my high school classmates went and dined with Haitian newcomers in Springfield as a form of outreach.

"Meeting many new friends," he wrote. "There is not a war on pets, etc. ... Cruised the city and it all looks the same — hard times have hit just about everywhere, but reports of Springfield burning down greatly exaggerated."

He added: "Fair and honest questions and concerns regarding the growing Haitian population should be discussed without a doubt."

Would it be so hard for Trump or Vance to just say something human like that?

We're having this same struggle in Seattle, with asylum-seekers adding to a homelessness crisis that was already straining area resources. The remedies seem elusive enough without stirring in fake poison.

The Seattle pollster Stuart Elway released a recent poll that had a surprising, and I would argue, related finding. He asked people here whether things will get better or worse in the next year, in the U.S., in Washington state and in your community.

Democrats, typically the anxiety party, were effusively optimistic. They said by huge margins of 35 to 65 percentage points that things are looking up everywhere. Meanwhile, Republicans said the opposite, that life is about to get a lot worse — in the country by a 22-point margin, in this state by 40 points, and in their communities by 13 points.

My Republican friends: Have you considered that you're feeling so bleak because the people you look up to keep telling you everything is going to hell?

Now it's special pet-eating levels of hell. It's mind-boggling, but it's their story, and they're sticking to it, even if they have to make it up.

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