President Obama is endorsing Hillary Clinton for president, he announced Thursday in a video message.
"I know how hard this job can be," Obama said in the video. "That's why I know Hillary will be so good at it. In fact, I don't think there's ever been someone so qualified to hold this office."
While the endorsement was expected, the timing wasn't.
The president met with Clinton's Democratic rival, Bernie Sanders, on Thursday. In remarks outside the White House after meeting with the president, Sanders thanked Obama and Vice President Joe Biden for being "impartial" throughout his primary battle with the former secretary of state.
Sanders listed the issues that propelled him to primary and caucus victories in nearly half the states, promising to take the problems of income disparity and campaign finance with him to the Democratic National Convention next month in July.
While he did not formally bow out of the race — which he trails by hundreds of delegates with only Washington, D.C. left to vote — he will do anything he can to make sure Donald Trump does not take the White House.



"Donald Trump would clearly, to my mind, and I think to the majority of Americans, be a disaster as president of the United State," he told reporters. "It's unbelievable to me -- and I say this sincerely -- that the Republican party would have a candidate for president who in the year 2016 makes bigotry and discrimination the cornerstone of his campaign."
Clinton and the president are hardly strangers.
The two ran against each other in the Democratic primary eight years ago before Clinton bowed out of the race on June 5. When Obama was elected president that November, Clinton served as his secretary of state during Obama's first term.
Watch Obama's endorsement below: