Pardon Donald Trump to get him out of the White House? America should make that deal Mike Pence should make Donald Trump an offer he can't refuse: Full pardon if he resigns the presidency and ends our national nightmare.

Jonathan Zimmerman | Opinion contributor

Can President Trump pardon himself? Nobody knows. But if he resigns, we all know someone who could pardon him.

I’m talking about Mike Pence, of course, who would succeed Trump in the White House. If Trump's vice president offered him a pardon in exchange for stepping down, he might take the deal. And it would be a great deal for the American people, too.

We’d avoid what now seems like an inevitable impeachment drama, in the wake of Michael Cohen’s guilty plea about campaign finance violations that he says were at Trump’s direction. And, most of all, we’d be spared the national calamity that is Donald J. Trump.

Witness the president's praise last week of his former campaign manager Paul Manafort, who was convicted of tax fraud but — unlike Cohen — refused to “break” by cooperating with prosecutors,Trump said. He also suggested that prosecutors should be barred from offering plea deals in exchange for witness testimony, which would make it almost impossible for them to do their jobs.

And even if he did violate campaign-finance laws, Trump added, “almost everybody that runs for office” does the same.

It's time to make a deal with Trump

Even Richard Nixon — our only president to resign — never went that far. Throughout the Watergate scandal, Nixon simply claimed that he was “not a crook.” That’s very different from saying that crooks shouldn’t be pressured to testify ... or that everyone is a crook, anyhow, so it’s no big deal.

So it’s time to offer Trump a truly big deal, and the only thing that might save us from him: a full pardon, in exchange for his resignation.

A week before Nixon quit, his former chief of staff Alexander Haig spoke to vice-president Gerald Ford about a possible pardon. We still don't know whether they agreed to trade it for Nixon's resignation, as critics later charged. Until his death in 2006, Ford steadfastly denied any such deal.

Instead, Ford said, he wanted to save the country from further rancor and division. A long criminal trial of Richard Nixon would simply “prolong the bad dreams” of Watergate, Ford declared.

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The public wasn’t buying it. Telegrams flew into the White House at a rate of 600 per hour after Ford pardoned Nixon, and they ran 6 to 1 against the decision. Over the next three weeks, Ford’s approval rating plummeted from 71 to 49 percent. The Republicans got slammed in the midterm elections that fall. And they would lose the White House two years later, when Jimmy Carter unseated Ford.

But history has been much kinder to Ford than the voters were. Watergate muckraker Bob Woodward, who skewered Ford at the time of the pardon, later concluded that it was “necessary for the nation.” So did Sen. Edward Kennedy, who presented Ford with the 2001 Profile in Courage Award at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston.

It would take courage for Mike Pence to pardon Donald Trump, too. Unlike Ford’s pardon of Nixon, which was restricted to Nixon’s time in the White House, Pence would probably have to offer a blanket pardon to Trump in order to get him to quit. That would cover tax evasion, money laundering, and whatever other crimes Trump might have committed before he was president.

Democrats would howl, but options are few

Democrats would howl, of course, charging Pence — as they charged Ford — with selling the pardon to become president. But what are the other options here? Given the rigid polarization of Congress and the two-thirds vote required in the Senate, it's highly unlikely Trump will be removed via impeachment. And there’s a long-standing tradition against indicting a sitting president, so he probably won't be forced out of office that way either.

But if Trump believed that he would face jail time once he left the White House, a pardon might persuade him to exit early. Remember, this is a guy who prides himself on the "Art of the Deal." He might even savor the pardon as the culminating masterstroke in a brilliant career of "tough negotiating," as he calls it.

Yes, it would be awful to watch Donald Trump walk away scot-free. But if that got him to walk away from the presidency, it would also be worth it. Take the deal, America! We need to end this bad dream, once and for all. And however we can.

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a coauthor of “The Case for Contention: Teaching Controversial Issues in American Schools.”