With all the dread and fuming about what Donald Trump is doing to America, a most common response is, this is not who we are! Maybe it is time to consider that this is exactly who we are — who we have become, slowly and carefully over the last 60 years or more.

The notion that Trump is destroying an America that is a force for peace, stability, and freedom in the world is patently untrue. Can anyone find a time since 1945 when the United States was not actively involved in undermining democratic elections? First in Europe to undermine socialist and communist parties, then everywhere else the U.S. decided it needed to. Coups against democratically elected leaders in Central America, Iran, Congo, Vietnam, Chile, Cambodia sowed decades of violence, instability and poverty in those countries and regions. And all so the United States could make the world in its image — and that image turned out to be an anti-communist dystopia.

And when communism ended up on the ash heap of history? Within a couple of decades, the United States escalated its destabilizing role in the world invading Afghanistan and Iraq, destroying millions more lives and subverting the entire region into a slaughterhouse for ISIS. And of course, ultimately tucking tail between our legs and slouching home leaving millions in despair and in the hands of the Taliban, ISIS, and Iran. We invade, we destroy, we turn our tail and go home, leaving decades of suffering in our wake.

And that too is who we really are and have been.

Too many liberals and lefties are reacting to Trump as if he is the fox in the henhouse and all we chickens are in peril. But what if Trump is the wolf among the coyotes? One predator overpowering another?

It would be unheard of in history for a superpower bestriding the world with its money, its language, its military might, to not make the world in its image, and turn all relations to its advantage, and destroy all opposition to its rule. And no amount of testimonies from Peace Corps volunteers, USAID, or Radio Free Wherever can overturn the simple fact that we have taken and taken from the world; and now we are in decline as all great superpowers someday are.

And not once in history has such a superpower avoided such an end.

That we want to save something of what we’ve known all our lives makes perfect sense. That we cannot, also does.

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And we know this because our greatest prophet told us so. We just have chosen not to listen.

In April 1967 Dr. Marin Luther King Jr. gave his ”Why I am opposed to the war in Vietnam” speech. Without a doubt his greatest speech ever; and his last great speech. (And the one which assured his murder.) In that speech King warned us all that America was “approaching spiritual death” because of its unbridled militarism abroad, while selling out the War on Want and the War on Poverty at home. America, he said, was acting “like a policeman for the whole world” and its arrogance would be its undoing.

America, he warned us in 1967, had become the “greatest purveyor of violence in the whole world.” And have we not continued to do that? To be that? Many have clamored on these pages and others that Trump “is not who we are.” Where have we not been that? When have we not been that?

And at home? Remember Bill Clinton? At the time he was called the first “Black president” don’t forget. Remember when he stood on the dais before a joint session of Congress and declared, with a smirk of his face, ”Three strikes and you’re out!” Remember the bipartisan standing ovation he got? And for 30 years that policy ripped the heart out of communities around the country. And he was a good liberal.

And that too is who we are and have been: merciless, predatory jailers. Our political infrastructure is as rotten as our roads and bridges; our education system has devolved into a game of standardized tests and numbers; our civil discourse is destroyed by social media, and billionaires pretty much control everything in our sham democracy.

This has happened over decades, and it is what the spiritual death of a nation looks like. That does not mean we as individuals are spiritually dead in our lives. But in the life of our nation, it is the best possible diagnosis for what ails us.

Still, many cry This is not us! when tales of non-judicial deportations hit their inboxes. And it is a nasty policy, but we have watched extra-judicial police killings in our inboxes for decades. And we had not been able to do anything about that before Trump.

Dr. King’s prophecy of our spiritual death has come to pass. That we haven’t and won’t heed him is because we have whitewashed him into insignificance with our insistence he was a dreamer, rather than a revolutionary. So, while we wallow in confusion, Dr. King’s role is secure: “a prophet is not without honor, except in his own country.”

Joe Gannon, writer, and teacher lives in Easthampton.