Bernie Sanders Vows to Work With Hillary Clinton to Defeat Donald Trump

But he still isn’t dropping out.


Following a private meeting with President Barack Obama at the White House on Thursday, Sen. Bernie Sanders announced that he is willing to work together with Hillary Clinton to defeat Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president.

“I look forward to meeting with her in the near future to see how we can work together to defeat Donald Trump and create a government which represents all of us and not just the 1 percent,” Sanders told reporters outside the White House.

“I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure Donald Trump does not become president of the United States.”

The Vermont senator, however, stopped short of endorsing Clinton, telling reporters he had no intention of dropping out of the race for the Democratic nomination just yet.

On Tuesday, after winning four out of the six primary contests, Clinton surpassed the 2,383-delegate count needed to secure the nomination, making her the first woman in American political history to be a major party’s nominee for president. High-ranking Democrats have since called on Sanders to bow out and unite the party against Trump.

Shortly after Clinton’s victory speech, the White House announced Obama would be meeting with Sanders at the senator’s request, but insisted that the meeting would not include a push from the president for Sanders to drop out of the race.

In his remarks on Thursday, Sanders thanked Obama and Vice President Joe Biden for displaying “impartiality” throughout the bruising primary season.

“They said in the beginning that they would not put their thumb on the scales and they kept their word and I appreciate that very, very much,” he said.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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