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The 2024 election is already historic for a number of reasons, from an assassination attempt to a last-minute dropout, with the country’s first Black woman candidate slated to secure the Democratic nomination. It is also perhaps the first time in American history that a vice presidential nominee has been rumored to have had sex with a couch.
Let’s get this out of the way: J.D. Vance did not say he had sex with a couch. The rumor began as a joke on X, when user @rickrudescalves tweeted on July 15: “can’t say for sure but he might be the first vp pick to have admitted in a ny times bestseller to fucking an Inside-out latex glove shoved between two couch cushions (vance, hillbilly elegy, pp. 179-181).” That the tweet appeared to be directly sourced from Vance’s memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, convinced many people that it was in fact true, but if they were to read pages 179 to 181, all they’d find is Vance talking about his time at Ohio State University.
So many people embraced the shitpost, however, that it took on a life of its own, with countless memes popping up on TikTok and X. “[W]e cannot let JD Vance near the oval office,” one person tweeted with a picture of the many sofas inside the room. Another juxtaposes Vance staring longingly with zoom-ins of leather couches while Barry White’s “Never, Never Gonna Give Ya Up” plays. When the rumor had spread widely enough for the Associated Press to publish a lengthy explainer headlined “No, JD Vance did not have sex with a couch,” someone else quoted it and referenced the infamous Bill Clinton denial, writing, “I did not have sectional relations.”
It’s common for rumors about famous people that are objectively untrue but are funny or entertaining to go viral (a famous example suggests Glee actress Lea Michele secretly can’t read), whether started by intentional trolls, as was the case with Vance and the couch, or via games of digital telephone, where all context and factuality get left untranslated. Most of the time, the reason the rumors spread is because people genuinely want to believe them. In Vance’s case, the fact that he’d written a coming-of-age book meant that a common trope (teen boy tries to have sex with inanimate object) made some degree of sense, coupled with the fact that he’s espoused some extremely bizarre views on sex and gender.
Curiously, the AP article debunking the rumor has been removed from its website — an unusual decision typically reserved for serious factual or editorial errors. As a spokesperson for the AP told Vox via email, “The story, which did not go out on the wire to our customers, didn’t go through our standard editing process. We are looking into how that happened.” Some still speculated that perhaps the AP’s commitment to fact-checking is such that, despite the fact that Vance didn’t write about it in Hillbilly Elegy, there’s no definitive proof he didn’t try to have sex with a couch.
What’s more bizarre is that the couch joke was only one of the three most off-putting things Vance has been known for during his first 10 days as a VP nominee, and the only one that wasn’t verified as true. After Trump announced his pick on July 15, a clip from his 2021 appearance on Tucker Carlson went viral in which he complained that the US was “effectively run” by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives,” naming Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “The entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children, and how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it,” he said, discounting Harris’s two step-children whom she co-parents with husband Doug Emhoff. Then, Vance tried and failed to get laughs at a Trump rally by making an awkward joke about drinking diet Mountain Dew and how “[Democrats] are going to call that racist.”
Vance already held extreme views on sex and gender; he opposes abortion even in cases of rape and incest and has compared it to slavery. He has voted against a bill ensuring access to IVF and suggested a ban on porn. He called universal child care “a class war against normal people.” He opposes legislating codifying the right to gay marriage and suggested that people in “violent” marriages shouldn’t get divorced.
He is also among the nebulous group of young intellectual conservatives backed by Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel loosely called the “New Right,” whose main project seems to be making techno-fascist and incel-adjacent ideas seem cool and edgy. On X, where Vance has spent a great deal of time, he at one point followed several white nationalist accounts, many of whom glorify bodybuilding and fascism while promoting the Great Replacement theory. He is, in other words, exactly the type of guy you could imagine claiming that couch sex robots were the beginning of a glorious future without women.
Pointing out Vance and Trump’s obvious weirdness now seems to be among Democrats’ main strategies in combating the Republican ticket. And it’s working: Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz was praised for his appearances on MSNBC in which he stressed how “weird” the Trump-Vance platform is, while the Harris campaign went viral for its statement on Trump’s Fox News appearance, which read, “is Donald Trump ok?” and listed major takeaways like “Trump is old and quite weird?” That kind of blunt, call-it-like-you-see-it candor was once a boon to the Trump camp, which delighted in offending “blue-haired” “soy milk” liberals whom they saw as myopic and out of touch. But when we’ve got someone like Vance spouting deeply antisocial and bizarre ideas that are way outside the realm of normal political discourse, the most effective response is often a simple, “What the hell?”
I don’t really need to explain why everyone believing a joke about a vice presidential candidate having sex with a couch is funny, it just is. Much like the memes implying Kamala Harris is a pop icon queening out to “Brat” summer, “JD Vance fucked a couch” is just another absurdity of the wildest election summer in recent history, one where the truth is so much crazier than fiction that the fiction starts becoming believable. No, J.D. Vance didn’t fuck a couch. But he’ll always be remembered as the vice presidential nominee that was once rumored to have fucked a couch. And that’s pretty weird.
