“I have no worries” about Donald Trump’s presidency, the Dalai Lama said this week. Lacking the Dalai Lama’s spiritual serenity and cosmic confidence, we do have some worries. But we also have some hopes.

The worries are not trivial. They center around Donald Trump’s character, judgment, and temperament. They also have to do with many of his professed policies—in particular, his strong inclination to be friendly to Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin abroad, and his plan to spend hundreds of billions of borrowed dollars on another bloated stimulus package at home. In these areas, Trump will be basically continuing failed policies of the Obama administration. They were wrong and ineffectual under a Democratic administration. There’s no reason to think they’ll be any more successful under a Republican one.