I have it on good authority (my mother) that my father wept for hours on the night Bobby Kennedy was killed in 1968. In the ’70s and early ’80s, he was an active member of the finance council of the Democratic National Committee. But by the ’90s he had come to embrace a shouting Fox News worldview of anti-immigrant and misogynist fervor, and he railed against what he called my hopeless political correctness.

The story of my father’s conversion is complicated, but if there was one event that led to his nursing his grievances, it is that in the early 1990s, he was sued for sexual harassment by one of his former employees. Though the case was settled out of court and my father was never in jeopardy of losing his law license, he stepped down from something called the Character and Fitness Committee of the Illinois State Bar Association. You might laugh at this, but it’s a real thing, and my father was especially proud of his service on this committee that measures a would-be lawyer’s moral fiber.

He felt misunderstood, maligned. Did he do it? He always said the allegations were patently untrue, but few people believed him.

By the time of the Obama administration, he had begun referring to the president with a Yiddish term I won’t repeat here (not, Dad, out of political correctness, but because it revolts me to this day and I can still hear you saying it in my ears). What he often had to say about women, especially my mother, who had left him, I won’t include here, either. But when I heard the Access Hollywood tape of Mr. Trump, I called my brother and asked him who the guy on the tape sounded like.

“You gotta ask?”

But he was my father; I loved him. When he died a few years ago, I happened to be staying with my old friend when I received the news. That weekend we ran together and talked. “Didn’t he teach you how to play chess?” my friend asked. “Who introduced you to Dickens?”

He helped me remember that, behind the anger, my father was still, and always, my father. I can’t expunge him from the record, my record. And to be honest it now brings me a warped kind of joy to think of what a kick he’d have gotten out of this last (ineffectual) roar of men of a certain age.