Advise and Dissent: Issuing his strongest condemnation yet of Donald Trump, President Obama yesterday urged Republicans to abandon their own presidential candidate. “The question they have to ask themselves is: If you are repeatedly having to say in very strong terms that what he has said is unacceptable, why are you still endorsing him?” Obama said at a White House press conference.

Citing Trumps wild attacks on various people and his evident ignorance of both world and domestic affairs, the President said, “This isn’t a situation where you have an episodic gaffe. This is daily,” Mr. Obama added. “There has to be a point at which you say, this is not somebody I can support for president of the United States, even if he purports to be a member of my party. The fact that that has not yet happened makes some of these denunciations ring hollow.”

Abandon Ship: Actually, it’s happening. Meg Whitman, a Hewlett Packard executive and big money Republican says she’s voting for Hillary, as Republican defections continue to go public.

A close aide to New Jersey’s Republican Gov. Chris Christie, a woman who helped invent the man, announced that she’s voting for Hillary Clinton in the fall. Sally Bradshaw, a top advisor to former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, says she’s leaving the party to vote for Hillary. And New York Rep. Richard Hanna became the first Republican congressman to announce that he’s breaking bad for Hillary. “He is unfit to serve our party and cannot lead this country,” Hanna said in an opinion piece.

Trump yesterday reiterated his attack on a Muslim couple whose Army son was killed in Iraq, and he refused to politically endorse Sen. John McCain and House Speaker Paul Ryan in their bids for re-election. Trump said of Ryan, “I’m not there yet,” using the same language Ryan once used about him.

Trump also told a crying baby to get out of one of his rallies. He said the general election might be rigged. When a veteran gave him his Purple Heart medal, Trump said, “I always wanted to get the Purple Heart. This was much easier.”

The Real Clear Politics average of polls now has Clinton leading Trump by 4.4 points. Seven of the eight polls completed since the Democratic Convention have Clinton in the lead. The CNN poll has her up by nine points, although the LA Times/USC has Trump up by two.

Four Pinocchios: Trump has been so busy making bad news for himself that he’s buried the bad news for Hillary Clinton.

Over the weekend in an interview with Fox News host Chris Wallace, Clinton tripped up once again about her private email while she was Secretary of State. Clinton said, “I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified materials. I am confident that I never sent nor received any information that was classified at the time.”

Wallace then played a clip of FBI Director James Comey telling a House committee, “There was classified material emailed.”

The Washington Post gave her a rating of “four Pinnocchios” for truthfulness. But while Trump gets pummeled for attacking the parents of a dead American soldier, Clinton has dodged the bad press she had coming.

World: An Emirates Airlines Boeing 777 made a crash landing in Dubai today, ripping off the landing year. All passengers and crew were evacuated before the plane blew up and burned. — North Korea fired a medium-range test rocket that flew 650 miles and nearly landed in Japanese waters in the Sea of Japan.

Nation: New York Police Commissioner Bill Bratton, possibly the best known cop in America, is leaving the NYPD for Teneo, “a global advisory company” with links to Hillary Clinton. They used to pay Clinton’s aide Huma Abedin $15,000 a month while she worked with Clinton at the State Department — The parents of the late Star Trek actor Anton Yelchin are suing Fiat/Chrysler, claiming their son was crushed against a fence because of a flaw in his Jeep Cherokee gearshift.

Journalism 101: NY Times reporter Adam Nagourney tweeted: “Trump today is like one of those journalism school tests: give students a list of everything he did/said and tell them to figure out the lede”

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