Trump is toast; Congress is all that matters now: Kevin O'Brien 

Things we don't know going into November's election:

• What Hillary Clinton is serious about.
• What Donald Trump is serious about.
• Which segment(s) of a fragmented electorate will set the policy tone for the immediate future.
• What political imperatives will drive the country over the long term.

In view of those uncertainties, the most important outcome in November won't be the presidential result. It will be the makeup of Congress.

Americans will need some time — a decade, at least — to sort out what they actually want and who is going to set the nation's base course.

This presidential election will not come anywhere near answering those questions. In fact, it will resolve nothing at all, no matter who wins.

Almost everyone who goes to the polls will be casting a vote against, not for, a candidate. The result is guaranteed to be one of the most immediately unpopular presidents the nation has ever seen. Whatever he or she tries to do will meet with a great deal of resistance.

And that's good, because Americans are nowhere near ready to resolve anything.

We don't even know, at this point, what the rank and file of the Republican Party stands for: Trump's phony populism; something more in line with the Tea Party's anti-tax, small-government outlook; the institutional wing's embrace of "big government the GOP way"; something else that isn't yet apparent, masked by the bizarre turns of events that have brought us a presidential campaign in which no one is paying attention to policy?

Any way you slice it, the Republican rank and file seems to consist almost entirely of insurgents — people who don't care much for the party as it is, and who are willing to fight to its death for fundamentally differing visions of what it should be.

For now, the "professional Republicans" — the apparatchiks who value the party above all else — have surrendered to the Trump moment, though they fear the effect that a Clinton landslide might have down the ballot.

It's their job to worry. And it's fitting that they worry, having failed to stop the nomination of the only Republican candidate incapable of mopping the floor with the spectacularly corrupt Hillary Clinton.

But I'm not sure they should have to worry.

No one understands better than the #NeverTrump people how vital it is to elect a Republican Congress, whether to stand in the way of Clinton's promised leftward lurch or — one would hope — to counteract Trump's dictatorial spasms.

We #NeverTrumpers are the ones who believe in constitutional government, regular order, checks and balances, the separation of powers — remember?

Moreover, I don't see anyone who was a pre-Trump Republican staying home on Election Day.

They'll go to the polls, and they'll go informed as to the candidates and the stakes, as they have always done. They'll hold their noses and vote for Trump, or they'll make some statement on the presidential line to protest the major-party choices on offer — leave it blank, throw a vote to the Libertarians or the Constitution Party, maybe write in the name of the neighbor's dog. Then they will dutifully make their choices for all of the less exalted offices.

If down-the-ballot GOP candidates are hurt by "deserters," the culprits won't be stalwart Republicans. They'll be the people who show up to vote for Trump because he's the only candidate they care about in the only race they know about.

Then again, even the least-informed, most-casual Trump voter ought to realize that it's easier for the king to rule when Parliament is friendly, and thus may hang around the polls long enough to vote for at least a few other Republicans.

In the best-case scenario, Trump gets trounced and the GOP learns a lesson about the foolishness of populism and the danger of cults of personality. The Republicans lose little or nothing in the House and just barely hang on to the Senate. After two years of public discontent with Clinton, the Republicans gain seats in both houses. After four years of blessed gridlock, Clinton takes her bribe money home to New York.

The worst-case scenario is President Clinton with a solidly Democratic Congress.

There's nothing the Republicans can do to keep President Clinton from happening. Out of 17 candidates who started down the presidential trail, they nominated the one who can't beat her.

But they can defend every seat in the House and the Senate with the utmost intensity.

Trump's beyond saving. America isn't.

O'Brien is The Plain Dealer's deputy editorial page editor.