My friend Frank doesn’t get rattled too easily.

He’s in his early 60s. Frank has been around. He told me he has witnessed a lot of presidential transitions. None of them prior to what’s about to occur has him as concerned — even a bit frightened — as the one that’s coming up.

Barack H. Obama is going to hand the presidency over to Donald J. Trump.

Frank is deeply concerned. As am I.

We chatted for a bit and we agreed on at least one fundamental point: It’s that Trump’s absolute lack of public service experience has left him woefully ill-prepared for becoming president of the United States of America.

I reminded Frank that we’ve had a number of dramatic transitions in our respective lifetimes. I mentioned Ronald Reagan taking over from Jimmy Carter in 1981. Sure, some folks considered Reagan little more than a B-movie actor who starred in those films with a chimpanzee named Bonzo.

But as I told Frank, even Reagan had government experience. He had administrative experience at that, as a successful two-term California governor.

Trump? He has spent his entire adult life in pursuit of a single goal: personal enrichment. He got a head start with a healthy inheritance from his wealthy father and then parlayed that nest egg into a vast fortune.

Public service? None. Zero.

Frank wondered, “What kind of thing is he going to do? What in the world does he stand for?” I told him that we don’t know. The president-elect campaigned for this office espousing zero core values. He didn’t articulate an ideology. Instead, he boasted at seemingly every campaign stop about how rich he is and how he intended to use his business acumen to “Make America Great Again.”

We did agree on this point, too. We both want Trump to succeed. We’re hoping for the best. Failure, we reminded each other, is going to cost all Americans dearly. Therefore, neither Frank nor I will wish the kind of failure for Trump that many of Barack Obama’s foes wished for him when he became president eight years ago.

Frank has another thing quite right: Now is the time to pray real hard for our country.

I’m with him on that, too.