There comes a time in every man’s life when he has to defend himself against accusations of couch fucking. And now is JD Vance’s time.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, just Google “JD Vance” and “couch.”
Look, there are three ways he can handle these accusations: He can ignore them, deny them or, ideally, embrace them. Stand in front of the American people and say, “If fucking a couch is wrong, I don’t want to be right. Also, people without kids should pay more in taxes, people with kids should have additional voting power, and death to ‘childless cat ladies,’ though I don’t have anything against cats, just women.”
As Alex Shephard writes in The New Republic, “Vance exacerbates Trump’s greatest political weakness. He is an anti-abortion zealot who has advocated for a national ban and compared the medical procedure to slavery. He has defended bans even for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest, saying, ‘Two wrongs don’t make a right.’ He recently voted for a bill that would have banned in vitro fertilization. He is a virulent misogynist who wants to roll back feminism’s gains.”
Overall, a pretty chill and normal guy.
Unsurprisingly, Vance is… not popular. With anybody. It’s pretty clear he’s an opportunistic creep without any strong convictions other than being “anti-woke.” Not long ago, Vance called convicted felon Donald Trump a charlatan, a sexual assaulter, cultural heroin and American Hitler. Now he’s running as Trump’s vice president.
Before he entered politics, Vance was a venture capitalist who wrote a best-selling book called “Hillbilly Elegy” that described his life growing up poor in Appalachia. The main thesis of the book is that poor people are lazy and that welfare is ruining their lives by zapping them of any motivation to better themselves. In their podcast “If Books Could Kill,” Michael Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri do a scathing take down of the book and I highly recommend it.
Anyway, back to the couch fucking. It all started with a post on X.
On July 15, User @rickrudescalves posted, using no capital letters because in America we are free, “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).”
It was a joke. An easily fact-checked claim. Nowhere in Vance’s terrible book does he write about fucking a couch.
But the fact that this took off and was repeated as fact over and over is fascinating to me. I first heard the couch claim from a colleague of mine. She ended her message to me with, “It’s true.”
It took two seconds of Googling to see that is not true. But the way two particular fact-checks were framed only reinforced the idea. Consider these two headlines: “No, J.D. Vance Did Not Say He Had Sex with Couch Cushions” from Snopes and “No, J.D. Vance did not have sex with a couch” from the Associated Press.
Look, I work in communications, and one of our cardinal rules is that you have to be very careful about how you frame things, especially if you’re trying to avoid reinforcing something you don’t want people to think or believe. For example, if you want to convey how much someone cares about animals, you don’t write, “This person has never kicked a dog or drowned a cat” because now you’ve just linked dog kicking and cat drowning with the person’s name. Instead, you would write something like, “This person adopted a one-eyed rescue schnauzer named Pebbles and a cat named Theo to whom who he lovingly administers the expensive medication that Theo will need for the rest of his life.”
Vance will never escape the couch connection.
Business Insider tracked down the X user who started the rumor. They refer to him as “Rick” because he doesn’t want his name disclosed.
“I have really enjoyed thinking about his team and all of the idiots associated with him having to grapple with this,” Rick told Business Insider. “I think by the time the AP thing came out, I was talking to one of my sisters and saying, ‘Oh yeah, Trump is already calling him a couch-fucker.’”
I mean, there’s no way that this hasn’t made it to chronically online Trump, right? Or maybe he’s only chronically on Truth Social. The man does love an echo chamber.It’s also telling that there have been very few “stop being mean to Vance” think pieces. People genuinely do not like him and he has worked hard to earn that dislike. Considering the harm that the policies he pushes would do, calling him a couch fucker is basically patriotic.
