Obama not pressuring Sanders to end campaign: White House

US President Barack Obama is not pressuring Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders to end his campaign to win the party’s nomination, according to White House spokesman Josh Earnest.

"Sen. Sanders has more than earned the right to make his own decision on his own timeframe about the future of his campaign and the president certainly respects the important work that Sen. Sanders has done on the campaign trail," Earnest told reported on Thursday.

"He certainly respects the strong support that he's built in all 50 states and that means that Sen. Sanders get to decide what the future of his campaign looks like,” he added.

Earlier on Thursday, Sanders met with Obama at the White House, two days after rival Hillary Clinton reached the 2,383-delegate threshold and became the Democratic Party's presumptive nominee.

'I will work with Clinton to defeat Trump'

Sanders said after the meeting he would work closely with Clinton to prevent presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump from reaching the White House.

The Vermont senator, however, gave no indication that he was ready to leave the presidential race yet, insisting that he would compete in next week’s primary election in Washington, DC.

“I will work as hard as I can, to make sure that Donald Trump does not become president of the United States,” Sanders told reporters, saying the real estate mogul “makes bigotry and discrimination the cornerstone of his campaign” and would be a “disaster” as president.

Sanders said he would continue fighting for the issues that were the platform of his campaign, including combating income inequality, college affordability and free universal healthcare.

“These are the issues that we will take to the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia in July,” Sanders said, declining to answer reporters’ shouted questions about whether he would leave the race.

Sanders has said one of the reasons he is staying in the race for the White House is because he does not want Americans to vote "for the lesser of two evils," in an apparent reference to Clinton.

Sanders, 74, has long argued that although he is losing the primary presidential race to Clinton, Democratic Party officials should consider how well he does with independents as one of the reasons he is better prepared to compete against Trump in the general election.

Obama’s 'cynical' endorsement

After the meeting with Sanders, Obama officially endorsed Clinton’s bid for the White House, saying she has “the courage, the compassion and the heart to get the job done.”

Commenting on this, American writer Daniel Patrick Welch said the notion of Clinton and "compassion" in the same breath is an insult to the English language.

“It is cynical and sad, of course, but completely unsurprising that Obama, King of Drones, who made such a thorough mockery of the Nobel Peace Prize, would wind up endorsing Clinton, a war zealot and cheerleader of the complete destruction of Libya along with the mass murder that defined that war,” he told Press TV on Thursday.

“It is the expected passing of the mantle from war criminal to war criminal in the imperialist citadel, and likely a fulfillment of a secret pact with the devil he made back in 2008,” the analyst observed. 

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