ST. LOUIS -- Bernie Sanders said Friday that he would vote for Hillary Clinton for president but stopped short of a full endorsement of his Democratic presidential rival.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, meanwhile, arrived in Scotland just as the United Kingdom was deciding to leave the European Union, and proclaimed the momentous departure "a great thing" and the subsequent decline of the British pound good for local companies -- including his own Turnberry golf course.

Sanders said in an interview with MSNBC's Morning Joe that he was "pretty good at arithmetic" and understood that Clinton had won more pledged delegates than he had during their lengthy primary.

Asked if he would vote for the former secretary of state if she wins the nomination, Sanders replied, "Yes," adding: "I'm going to do everything I can to defeat Donald Trump."

The U.S. senator from Vermont has not called on his supporters to vote for Clinton and has not said whether he would campaign on her behalf.

Sanders has said repeatedly since the final primary on June 14 that he will not end his presidential campaign until the Democratic convention in Philadelphia. He made stops Friday in Albany and Syracuse, N.Y., to promote his campaign's movement and to rally supporters on behalf of congressional candidates.

But Sanders' in-between status, as a candidate who has lost the nomination but not stopped campaigning, has come to overwhelm the issues he'd prefer to talk about. In a round of interviews from MSNBC, CBS and CNN, Sanders spent much of his time finding new ways to say that he was not ending his campaign until Clinton and the Democratic Party adopted parts of his platform.

"This is not a basketball game, where you win or you lose," he told CNN. "I don't have the votes to become the Democratic nominee. You know that; I know that. We're both good at arithmetic."

On CBS, Sanders said of Clinton that he hadn't "heard her say the things that need to be said."

Asked what those are, he said she has yet to say how she would address the "crisis" in higher-education costs, that she would raise the minimum wage to $15 or that she supports universal health care. Clinton has said a $15 minimum wage may work only for certain cities, that vocational education should be free but public college education should not, and that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act should remain the basis for expanding coverage.

The day's bigger news -- the United Kingdom's vote to leave the European Union -- took second billing in Sanders' interviews. On MSNBC, he did not say whether he agreed with the result.

"What worries me very much is the breaking down of international cooperation," Sanders said. "On the other hand, I think what this vote is about is an indication that the global economy is not working for everybody. It's not working in the United States for everybody, and it's not working in the U.K. for everybody."

Trump on U.K. Vote

Touching down in Scotland on Friday morning to visit his luxury resort and golf course, Trump, who in the run-up to the British referendum had suggested that the U.K. leave the European Union, proclaimed, "I said this was going to happen, and I think that it's a great thing."

"Basically they took back their country," Trump said.

The New Yorker predicted that it would benefit his business and declared that President Barack Obama contributed to the outcome.

"Look, if the pound goes down, they're going to do more business," Trump said when asked during a news conference about the referendum's market ramifications. "When the pound goes down, more people are coming to Turnberry, frankly."

Trump also said he saw "a big parallel" between the vote in the U.K. and the sentiment that helped fuel bid to become the Republican presidential nominee in the United States.

"People want to take their country back, they want to have independence in a sense, and you see it with Europe, all over Europe, and you're going to have more than just, in my opinion, more than just what happened last night," Trump said. "You're going to have many other cases where people want to take their borders back, they want to take their monetary back, they want to take a lot of things back, they want to be able to have a country again."

His message in favor of a British exit, however, was not necessarily welcome in Scotland, whose citizens had overwhelmingly voted to remain part of Europe and were already discussing the possibility of breaking from England as a result of Thursday's vote.

Hours after Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain announced he would resign as a result of the vote, Trump offered his own political analysis, saying frustration with the status quo had helped influence the result.

"People are angry, all over the world, people, they're angry," he said. "They're angry over borders, they're angry over people coming into the country and taking over, nobody even knows who they are. They're angry about many, many things."

Trump predicted that the anger will spread.

"There's plenty of other places," he said. "This will not be the last."

At the news conference, he was pressed repeatedly on the British referendum, and at several points he blamed Obama, who had urged the U.K. not to split from the EU.

"It's not his country, it's not his part of the world, he shouldn't have done it, and I actually think that his recommendation perhaps caused it to fail," Trump said.

Trump also criticized Clinton, saying she had "misread" the mood of the country.

Trump's visit to Scotland will continue today in Balmedie, overlooking the North Sea.

In the U.S., Clinton called for a continuation of the U.S. commitment to the U.K. and Europe in a statement Friday, but she said economic uncertainty spawned by a British exit from the EU may hurt working families and requires a U.S. president with experience.

"This time of uncertainty only underscores the need for calm, steady, experienced leadership in the White House to protect Americans' pocketbooks and livelihoods, to support our friends and allies, to stand up to our adversaries, and to defend our interests," Clinton said. "It also underscores the need for us to pull together to solve our challenges as a country, not tear each other down."

Clinton aides also highlighted Trump's assertion Friday that a weaker pound would make his Scottish golf course more attractive to visitors.

"Donald Trump actively rooted for this outcome and he's rooting for the economic turmoil in its wake," said Jake Sullivan, Clinton's senior policy adviser.

Democratic Platform

In St. Louis, meanwhile, Sanders' allies were working to incorporate many of those ideas into the Democratic Party's platform that will be adopted at the July convention.

Democrats voted down an amendment to the party's platform that would have opposed the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal.

Members of a Democratic National Convention drafting committee defeated the proposal led by Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., that would have added language rejecting the Pacific Rim trade pact, which has been opposed by both Clinton and Sanders.

Obama has promoted the trade deal despite opposition from Democrats. Members of the panel said it would be wrong to undercut the outgoing president in the platform.

The panel instead backed a measure that said "there are a diversity of views in the party" on the trade deal and reaffirmed that Democrats contend any trade deal "must protect workers and the environment."

"What I don't want to do is leave this place disregarding the position of the president of the United States," said Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., a Clinton supporter who noted his opposition to trade deals.

Allies of Clinton and Sanders pored over the 15,000-word draft of the platform on the first day of a two-day meeting in a St. Louis hotel.

The panel was expected to consider language on the Israel-Palestinian conflict that has divided some members of the party. The current draft advocates working toward a "two-state solution of the Israel-Palestinian conflict" that guarantees Israel's security with recognized borders "and provides the Palestinians with independence, sovereignty, and dignity."

Parts of the draft document reflect Sanders' influence. It calls for the expansion of Social Security and refers to the current minimum wage of $7.25 an hour as a "starvation wage," a phrase that Sanders often uses and says Americans should earn "at least $15 an hour."

Sanders said in the interview that his focus was on representing at the convention the millions of people who voted for him and encouraging them to become part of the democratic process.

"My job right now is to fight for the strongest possible platform in the Democrat election," he said. That would include an agenda to create jobs and raise the minimum wage, he said.

In New York City on Thursday night, Sanders told supporters that his campaign is "just getting started" fighting economic inequality, changing the Democratic Party and bolstering Democrats running for Congress.

Speaking to a packed hall in Manhattan, Sanders took something of a victory lap as he reviewed the states he won and the fact that many young people flocked to his campaign over anyone else's.

Clinton earlier this month secured the combined number of pledged and unpledged delegates required to carry the Democrats' banner against Trump. While Sanders has acknowledged that he will not be the nominee, he has not formally endorsed Clinton, pointing to the need for the former secretary of state and first lady to voice support for the proposals he staked his campaign on.

He has been signaling the transition of his movement from a presidential run to one aimed at bolstering liberal Democratic candidates for Congress and offices up and down the ballot.

In Syracuse, N.Y., Sanders hosted a rally with congressional candidate Eric Kingson, who is seeking the Democratic nomination in Tuesday's primary to challenge U.S. Rep. John Katko, the Republican incumbent.

Sanders has raised about $2.5 million for congressional and legislative candidates in recent weeks, sending out fundraising emails on behalf of candidates who could further Sanders' message.

Information for this article was contributed by Ken Thomas, Laurie Kellman, Ezra Kaplan, Julie Pace and staff members of The Associated Press; by Ashley Parker of The New York Times; and by Angela Greiling Keane, Justin Sink and staff members of Bloomberg News

A Section on 06/25/2016