angle down icon angle down icon. There’s no evidence that JD Vance did anything with the couch other than sit on it, but people have made plenty of jokes about it. Anna Moneymaker/Getty Image; iStock; Rebecca Zisser/BI A viral post on X has been joking about JD Vance having sex with a couch. Business Insider tracked down the poster, who admitted to being “up in arms” about the joke, but believes it captures an “ecstatic truth” about Vance.
American voters are totally addicted to couch discourse.
On July 15, shortly after Donald Trump announced that J.D. Vance was joining his list of candidates, user @rickrudescalves posted a joke on X: “We can’t say for sure, but he might be the first VP candidate to admit in a New York Times bestseller to having sex with an inside-out latex glove placed between two couch cushions (Vance, Hillbilly Elegy, pages 179-181).”
Needless to say, pages 179-181 of “Hillbilly Elegy” are not devoted to a description of Vance’s couchsurfing, and there is no evidence that he did anything with the couch other than sit on it.
Still, many people found it funny, and while @rickrudescalves hid the post within a week of it being posted, the couch joke had already made an impression.
According to Google Trends, one in every seven people who searched for “JD Vance” on Google in the past week also searched for “JD Vance couch.” Memes of Vance fantasizing about living room furniture have flooded the Internet. Although clearly a joke, the post was debunked by two fact-checks by mainstream media outlets: one by Snopes and one by the Associated Press (which later removed the fact-check from its website). Predictably and unexpectedly, these debunkings catapulted Couch Discourse into the mainstream.
The rumor spread also heralded a new style of online activism by Democrats: In contrast to the “low-key, high-key” politeness of the Obama era, Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign has adopted a tongue-in-cheek tone, writing on X: “J.D. Vance makes no secret of his hatred for women.”
The couch discourse has even been broadcast on television: “Where on earth do you get ideas like that?” Late Show host Stephen Colbert asked last week.
The grocery store poster told Business Insider in a phone conversation this weekend that the idea came to them while they were shopping the day Vance was announced as Trump’s running mate.
Business Insider tracked down the post’s author, who we’ll call Rick, after his previous X screen name, @rickrudescalves. The author became uncomfortable with the amount of attention the post had generated last week and changed his X screen name to protect his account. The author asked not to be named because his employer doesn’t allow him to speak to the media, but Business Insider has confirmed his identity.
Rick doesn’t work in politics; he has a desk job. He’s politically left-leaning and says he views Vance with “disrespect, if not outright disrespect.” That’s in part because he had a similar upbringing to the tough childhood Vance portrayed in “Hillbilly Elegy.” But Rick says those experiences have led him to some decidedly different political conclusions than Vance’s.
Rick said the fact that many people across the political spectrum believe his posts to be true doesn’t bolster his confidence in voters’ critical thinking abilities, though he does acknowledge that he bears the primary responsibility for any misunderstandings. “I think I was already in the mud when it came to media literacy and stuff like that,” he said.
He said he was a little concerned that he was being seen as spreading misinformation about the election, but that wasn’t his intention. He said he posted it because he saw in Vance an indescribable quality that most closely resembled the nickname “couchfucker.”
“It’s really fun to think about his team and all the idiots he has around that have to deal with this,” Rick said. “I think by the time the AP thing came out, I was talking to one of my sisters and we were like, ‘Oh yeah, Trump’s already calling him a couch fucker.'”
Rick is not the first person to post a silly joke that fell flat for many and ended up causing a stir in the political world. In 2016, a Twitter user Posts They wrote that they “work at the post office in Columbus, Ohio, and love tearing up absentee ballots that were voted for Trump.” Gateway Pundit and Rush Limbaugh made the post credible, eliciting statements from the US Postal Service and ultimately leading to an FBI investigation.
Perhaps it’s immaterial whether Vance actually had sex with one or more couches, Rick suggests. Vance’s lovemaking with couches is best understood as what Werner Herzog described as “ecstatic truth,” in Herzog’s words, “a kind of truth that is the enemy of mere fact,” embracing falsehood that “makes visible the true nature of man.”
As for his decision to include a fake quote in a tweet about a man having sex with a couch, Rick claims it was inspired by lofty ideas. “I don’t mean to be big-headed,” he says, but he is an English major and “has a literary taste.” Including page numbers is “the way of writers” like Jorge Luis Borges and John Fowles, who used excerpts and quotes from real and invented sources to lend authenticity to their novels. “This is something I’ve found interesting my whole life,” he says.
He said he was also inspired by the story of former President Lyndon Johnson asking his campaign manager to make up a rumor that one of his political opponents liked to have sex with pigs.
“Well, you can’t just call him a pig and get away with it,” the campaign manager responded, according to journalist Hunter S. Thompson in “Fear and Loathing: The ’72 Campaign.” “Nobody’s going to believe that.”
“I know,” Johnson replied, “but I’ll let the bastard deny it.”
So far, as comedian John Oliver gleefully pointed out during his “Last Week Tonight” segment on Sunday, Vance has chosen not to deny it.
A spokesman for Vance did not respond to a request for comment.
