Even that doesn't seem appropriate. Nixon resigned knowing that his VP would take over and pardoned him. It still seems self-serving.

yep. Politicians have been using them for over 100 years, including Thomas Jefferson. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopen

We had safety measures. It was called the Electoral College, and the entire reason it was put there was to get a small group of people separated from groupthink to really think " Are you SURE this is the right candidate?" Then states decided to pass laws to penalize the act of being a faithless elector, which is EXACTLY the mechanism of protection to keep a demagogue out of office. You can't sit here and whine about what a criminal demagogue President can do not being safe when the Safety got stripped not more than 4 Presidencies in by the machinations of political parties. You had the safety of the impeachment process by Congress. Your Senators refuse to rein the man in. You had the Safety of the Judiciary. Your Senators did everything to stack that too. There is no one else to delegate the responsibility of clemency oversight to. In fact, systemically, you can't. Not while maintaining the President's inherent check on the Legislature & the Judiciary and thereby creating problems elsewhere. You just weaken the system. We put a felon in the White House even after seeing what they did the first time. That's the effing problem. It isn't the position. It's who got put in it. That's the only damn thing you can fix. The only people who should be ashamed are the ones who got taken in by this idiot's campaign, and couldn't be arsed to understand the levers they were putting him in front of. I bloody well did. I didn't vote for him. Even if I had to swallow my disgust and vote for someone else I was somewhat less doubtful of the efficacy of. There is no blood on my hands for this Presidency. Not a drop. I did my part. Now I'm doing my part for the next one in hopefully galvanizing people to wake up and take this crap seriously, unless they wish to remain a laughing stock to the rest of the world for the foreseeable future, even though, to be quite honest, I'm pretty certain that ship has sailed. Alas, it is my civic duty, no matter how hopeless the chances of success.

For every problem there is always a solution that seems quick, simple, and is almost certainly, entirely wrong in the grand scheme of things. Dorking with the Pardon, is one of them. Is it controversial? Yes. Is it necessary? Yep. Sure is. Someone has to be able to stop the wheels of the System from continuing to grind when the System changes it's mind, and that's what the Pardon is for. It is vested in a single person. To the rest of the system, it doesn't even factor in. Take this as a lesson learned, and don't put it in front of manchildren to be abused with wild abandon. Then just as we move forward to recover from this turbulent learning experience, we'll just have to clean up the mess.

You can't fix stupid. You can only clean up after it.

(You're more forgiving than I am.)

We also re-elected Bush Jr. after he started the disastrous war in Iraq, along with doing a bunch of other terrible shit. Is it really that surprising that Trump was elected twice?