Yes, I believe this is the most likely scenario or some "bone spurs health problem" which allows him to avoid the severe legal consequences of his criminality.
If he resigns, is it not Pence that would pardon him? I can easily see this happening but the SDNY & other investigations can't be pardoned
Pence could pardon him
if Trump resigns pre-election and Pence becomes President, as Ford did with Nixon. But I see no evidence that Trump is planning to resign.
Speaking of Ford, here's the mighty Hunter S Thompson on Ford's pardoning of Nixon:
'About five hours after I’d sent the final draft of a massive article on The Demise of Richard Nixon off on the mojo wire and into the cold maw of the typesetter in San Francisco, Gerald Ford called a press conference in Washington to announce that he had just granted a “full, free and absolute” presidential pardon, covering any and all crimes Richard Nixon may or may not have committed during the entire five and a half years of his presidency.
[...]
Or at least that’s how it sounded to me, when I was jolted out of a sweat-soaked coma on Sunday morning by a frantic telephone call from Dick Tuck. “Ford pardoned the bastard!” he screamed. “I warned you, didn’t I? I buried him twice, and he came back from the dead both times. … Now he’s done it again; he’s running around loose on some private golf course in Palm Desert.”
I fell back on the bed, moaning heavily. No, I thought. I didn’t hear that. Ford had gone out of his way, during his first White House press conference, to impress both the Washington press corps and the national TV audience with his carefully considered refusal to interfere in any way with Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski’s legal duty to proceed on the basis of evidence and “prosecute any and all individuals.” Given the context of the question, Ford’s reply was widely interpreted as a signal to Jaworski that the former president should not be given any special treatment…. And it also meshed with Ford’s answer to a question in the course of his confirmation hearings in the Senate a few months earlier, when he’d said, “I don’t think the public would stand for it,” when asked if an appointed vice-president would have the power to pardon the president who’d appointed him, if the president were removed from office under criminal circumstances.
[...]
“Mother of babbling god!” I muttered. The word “deadline” caused my brain to seize up momentarily. Deadline? Yes. Tomorrow morning, about 15 more hours…. With about 90% of my story already set in type, one of the threads that ran all the way through it was my belief that nothing short of a nuclear war could prevent Richard Nixon’s conviction. The only thing wrong with that argument was its tripod construction, and one of the three main pillars was my assumption that Gerald Ford had not been lying when he’d said more than once, for the record, that he had no intention of considering a presidential pardon for Richard Nixon “until the legal process has run its course.”
Cazart! I hung up the phone and tossed my chart across the room. That rotten, sadistic little thief had done it again. Just one month earlier he had sandbagged me by resigning so close to the deadline that I almost had a nervous breakdown while failing completely…. And now he was doing it again, with this goddamn presidential pardon, leaving me with less than 24 hours to revise completely a 15,000 word story that was already set in type.'