In her diary, on 9 November last year, my mother used capital letters for the first time. “DONALD TRUMP WON!” she wrote. When I next spoke to her, she was in a hospital bed. She had, she said, been in such a state of shock that she had lost her balance and tripped on the last stair. It was hours before she could crawl to the phone and call an ambulance. She had, it turned out, smashed her left hip. The next few weeks were terrible. My diary entry for 14 December is brief: “Mum died.”

The day after the EU referendum had been bad enough. I met my mother and godmother for a Thai lunch. They had met in Bangkok, where they both lived 60 years ago, as wives of husbands who had been posted abroad. My godmother lived in Bangkok and then Tokyo. My mother lived in Bangkok then Rome and then, when I was nine months old, a housing estate in Guildford. She had grown up on the west coast of Sweden. She met my father on a hill in Heidelberg. She spoke fluent Swedish, English, German and Italian, pretty good French and basic Thai. I think you can probably guess what she thought of Brexit.

Euro-elite, I can hear you say. Citizen of nowhere who could glide between countries as if they were just different cafes, offering different cakes. Er, no. My mother’s father worked on a local paper. He died when my mother was 12 and her sister was 8. Her mother got up at four every morning to work in the local post office. My mother was brought up on hand-me-downs and free school lunches. She got to university on a scholarship and did a four-year degree in half the time. When she married my father, they lived in a bedsit with a shared kitchen and bathroom until he was posted abroad. When the rules allowed, she worked. She always worked. Even when she retired, she retrained and still worked. She carried on studying, as she worked, and as she brought up her family. My mother believed in hard work. She believed in education.

The current US president does not seem to believe in hard work. He seems to spend several hours a day watching TV. He seems to spend several hours a day messing around on Twitter. And when I say “messing around”, I mean messing around. What could be more fun than calling one of the most dangerous men in the world “little rocket man”, particularly when that man’s hobby is showing off his nuclear weapons?

We know he has a huge IQ. We know he has “one of the greatest memories of all time”. We know these things because Donald Trump has told us they are true.

It isn’t clear what the US president thinks of education, but we do know that he appointed an education secretary who has called public education a “dead end”. We know he doesn’t read. “I never have,” he said when he was named Republican nominee for president. We know he doesn’t believe in experts because they “can’t see the forest for the trees”. We know he has a huge IQ. We know he has “one of the greatest memories of all time”. We know these things because Donald Trump has told us they are true.

In the year since he was elected president of the United States, we have learned a lot of other things too. We learned that he lied about the size of the crowds at his inauguration. We learned that he lies, in fact, about pretty much everything. About 70% of the statements he made during his campaign were found by PolitiFact to be false, and that little tic doesn’t seem to be getting better.

We learned that facts Trump doesn’t like are “fake news”. We learned that policies – the “Muslim ban”, the withdrawal from the Paris accord – are made in spite of the evidence, to spite. We learned that Trump thinks neo-Nazis are “very fine people”. After one woman was killed by them, two African American commentators were brought on to Trump’s favourite channel, Fox News. One was meant to be talking about the dangers of erasing history. Instead, live on air, he cried. So did the woman who was meant to be arguing with him, but didn’t. When I saw the footage, I cried too.

In the year since my mother slipped on that step, all this has come to seem normal. It is normal for the leader of the western world to lie. It is normal for him to hurl racist abuse, divide families and insult mothers of fallen soldiers. It is normal for him to claim that he knew nothing of Russian interference in his election, dirty money or his cronies’ lies. It is normal for people to say that we are now living in a time like the 1930s, and for other people to say that that is being dramatic, because drama now feels routine.

My mother was born in 1934. She grew up in a social democracy and taught me to believe in social democracy. She believed in decency. She believed in kindness. She drove “old ladies” even when she was one, and opened her home to people from around the world. When she came to live in this country she hated the snobbery and the class system, but she believed in the power of government to change things for the better.

I miss my mother more than I can say, but I am glad she’s not watching the news now. Priti Patel lying. Boris Johnson treating our country’s future as a joke. Sexual harassers everywhere. And Donald Trump. Well, Donald Trump, let me just say on behalf of my mother: you may have “won” the election, and launched a war on truth and justice and kindness, but you and your lying ilk will not win it.

• Christina Patterson is a writer, broadcaster and columnist