Vox Sentences: Wall Street is basically hanging on to Donald Trump’s every tweet

Donald Trump can literally move markets with a tweet, which isn't scary at all or anything; even Angela Merkel is moving to the right on immigrants to protect herself politically; two cases of road rage, two NFL players killed, two very different police responses.

PEOTUS giveth and PEOTUS tweeteth away

Pool / Kevin Dietsch via Getty

• Boeing stock fell almost $2 a share Tuesday morning, apparently prompted by a tweet from the president-elect of the United States in which he called for a contract to build future Air Force One planes to be canceled. [Washington Post / Philip Bump]
• It's not clear exactly what prompted Trump's tweet. After all, if he wanted to cut government waste, he could start with the $215 billion of Pentagon waste revealed this week by a Washington Post investigation. [Washington Post / Craig Whitlock and Bob Woodward]
• But it may not have been a coincidence that just minutes earlier, the Chicago Tribune had published an article in which Boeing's CEO criticized Trump. [Chicago Tribune / Robert Reed]
• As PEOTUS taketh away, though, PEOTUS also giveth. Trump also claimed Tuesday to have gotten the Japanese company SoftBank to invest $50 billion in the US and create an estimated 50,000 jobs. [CNBC / Jacob Pramuk and Anita Balakrishnan]
• You may be shocked to learn this is not the whole story! For one thing, the $50 million is coming from a fund SoftBank's CEO set up earlier this year with countries including Saudi Arabia. For another, it's going to be difficult to create 50,000 jobs by investing in startups, which is where the money is expected to go. [WSJ / Ryan Knutson]
• Companies with SoftBank investments (including Sprint) saw their shares jump after Trump's boast. The effect the president-elect is having on the stocks of individual companies is noticeable enough that analysts are already trying to figure out if they can program bots to buy and sell stocks based on Trump's tweets. (Not that that power could be used more maliciously at all.) [CNBC / Eamon Javers]
• But if Trump's stunt last week with the Carrier furnace factory in Indiana is any indication, this sort of job-creating hype bullying is what America wants from its president-elect. [Morning Consult / Jon Reid]

Merkel vs. burqa

Getty / Sean Gallup

• German Chancellor Angela Merkel told her party, the Christian Democratic Union, that she supports bans on burqas and full facial veiling "whenever legally possible." [Slate / Mark Joseph Stern]
• It's a troubling move because Merkel is one of the few (and dwindling!) leaders of Western countries who's a forthright defender of immigration and cosmopolitanism — somewhat like Obama coming out against the ground zero mosque. [Vox / Zeeshan Aleem]
• Merkel's motivation is abundantly clear. She's facing a threat from the far-right Alternative for Democracy, an anti-immigrant, populist right-wing group whose leader gets the same kind of pleasantly-surprised-she-doesn't-look-like-a-Nazi media coverage that equivalent groups get in the US. [New Yorker / Thomas Meaney]
• (If you are having trouble keeping track of all of Europe's insurgent right-wing parties, this New York Times graphic is highly recommended.) [NYT / Jeremy Ashkenas and Gregor Aisch]
• In Merkel's defense, Germany has taken in a lot of refugees in the past few years, and it is struggling to integrate all of them because integration is really hard. Her logic that it's important for citizens in a democracy to see each other's faces isn't unassailable, but it's plausible that that really is how most Germans feel. [NYT / Alison Smale]
• The fundamental problem is that belief in diversity and pluralism, throughout the US and Europe, might be a minority position — and that defending those values may actually make them less popular. But abandoning them would doom them for good. [Vox / Dara Lind]

The killing of Joe McKnight

New York Jets / Al Pereira via Getty

• Former NFL player Joe McKnight (who is black) was killed Saturday night by a man named Ronald Gasser (who is white), in what appeared to be a case of road rage. [Vox / German Lopez]
• Gasser was released from custody over the weekend, causing outcry — then jailed again on a manslaughter charge Monday night, perhaps in response to said outcry. [New Orleans Times Picayune / Carlie Kollath Wells]
• The sheriff of Jefferson Parish went to great lengths Tuesday to attack the public outcry — in a press conference ostensibly about the charge against Gasser, he spent more time complaining about social media outrage and black-on-black crime than talking about the actual crime he and his office were investigating. [Huffington Post / Travis Waldron]
• Because Gssser and McKnight appear to have been involved in an altercation before Gasser shot McKnight, the case may stir up another round of controversy about the circumstances under which the law allows people to attack in the name of self-defense (an issue broader than, but often reduced to, "stand your ground" laws). [LawNewz / Elura Nanos]
• But as is often the case, the issue appears to be less the law than its application. When Saints player Will Smith was killed in another road rage incident earlier this year, the man who killed him, Cardell Hayes (who is black), was immediately arrested and a hearing was set; Hayes's murder trial started this week. [WGNO / Steven Maloney]
• Gasser, on the other hand, was released — despite having a previous arrest and conviction in a road rage case, after an incident at the same intersection at which he killed Joe McKnight. [The Advocate / Ramon Antonio Vargas]

Miscellaneous

• The characters from the musical Rent, in retrospect, are kind of everything people call out these days about cluelessly exploitative white bohemianism. [Washington Post / Alyssa Rosenberg]
• The story of Donald Trump's call with Taiwan Friday keeps getting weirder. (Apparently Bob Dole was a key behind-the-scenes player.) [Politico / Isaac Arnsdorf]
• Speaking of Trump backstories: The head of the union representing Carrier employees at the Indiana plant Trump "saved" has some words. [Washington Post / Danielle Paquette]
• A California Ku Klux Klan leader who's led "White Lives Matter" rallies has been arrested for stabbing another Klan member. [LAT / James Queally]
• Rehab, but for failing to adult. [Fusion / Molly Osberg]

Verbatim

• "The packaging of this canned butter from France evokes a cat food marketed exclusively to depressed or bored cats." [Lucky Peach / Walter Green]
• "The real challenge seems to be getting white people to risk social closeness and then the hard work of talking about race." [Slate / Tracie McMillan Cottom]
• "[T]he harebrained schemes, longings, and impulses that make it through my own filters of inhibition and sobriety often turn out to be, at minimum, genuinely interesting." [The Awl / Kristy Coulter]
• "'We’re worried that our president might actually turn out be to a fascist,' said one Department of Labor employee. 'That’s a not-insignificant cause for concern.'" [Huffington Post / Jessica Schulberg and Amanda Terkel]
• "It’s unclear exactly who first bastardized the bolognese." [Atlas Obscura / Cara Giaimo]

Watch this: Tired of being bullied, this “MuslimGirl” found a way for Muslim women to talk back

From the Jersey Shore to Forbes's “30 Under 30,” this is life as the founder of MuslimGirl. [YouTube / Vox]

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