It Doesn’t Matter Whether JD Vance Fucked a Couch. What Matters Is, It’s Out There.

Did JD Vance have sex with a couch? I’ll answer that with another question: How can you or I or anyone but Vance really know?

By Kylie Cheung  |  July 25, 2024 | 4:29pm
Photo: Getty Images/Art: Kylie Cheung Politics JD Vance
It Doesn’t Matter Whether JD Vance Fucked a Couch. What Matters Is, It’s Out There.

There are things that can be fact-checked: The sky is often blue—correct. The summer solstice takes place each year on either June 20, 21, or 22—also correct. But some things can’t be fact-checked, mostly because as human beings, we lead interior lives and no one—certainly not the Associated Press—is with us 24/7. That brings us to this week, and the curious case of a Wednesday AP story headlined, “No, J.D. Vance did not have sex with a couch.” By Thursday morning, the story was gone.

In the days since Ohio senator JD Vance joined the GOP ticket as Donald Trump’s running mate, the rollout has been anything but smooth. The biggest headlines about the Hillbilly Elegy author and former (?) emo, 2000s blogger include his vast unpopularity (he’s facing record-low approval ratings among VP nominees post-RNC), the resurfacing of his 2021 pitch that childless people should lose their voting rights, and now, couchgate—the latest viral political meme that suggests Vance, at one point in his youth, had sex with a couch.

Did JD Vance have sex with a couch? I’ll answer that with another question: How can you or I or anyone but Vance really know? At a certain point, especially in politics, the truth becomes immaterial—if people are talking about it (in this case, whether you’ve fucked a sofa), you’re losing.

But let me back up.

Couchgate started shortly after Vance was announced as Trump’s VP on July 15, and Twitter began sharing especially weird or illuminating snippets from Vance’s memoir. Some were real, others were fake, but given Vance’s reputation as something of a, uh, quirky (derogatory) guy, most were taken at face value. So, when now-private Twitter user @rickrudescalves wrote, “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),” plenty of Twitter users were happy to run with this narrative. This week, it reentered the discourse in a major way, spawning bizarre TikTok edits of Vance appearing to lust for bodacious loveseats—all set to Kendrick Lamar’s universal diss track for sex deviants, “Not Like Us.” Other Twitter users have cautioned that Vance should be kept as far from the White House as possible, pointing to photos of its numerous, plush sofas. Some have juxtaposed Vance’s, err, time in the sofa with potential Democratic vice presidential pick Mark Kelly’s time in space. A lot is happening!

By Wednesday, the AP, Snopes, and even the Cut issued denials with bold headlines to the tune of “J.D. Vance Did Not Have Sex With a Couch.” These articles (especially the AP’s, which is now offline) then drew their own media coverage—it’s not every day you have the AP investigating whether a politician who could soon be a heartbeat away from the presidency fucked sofa cushions. If I’m putting on my journalist hat for a second, obviously, the AP and these other outlets are fact-checking whether the couch-fucking anecdote actually appears in Hillbilly Elegy. Indeed, that can be fact-checked: It’s not in the book. But, I repeat, at this point, that’s inconsequential. As one very angry conservative writer at the National Review tweeted on Thursday morning, what matters is that—whether through viral memes or the literal Associated Press—the allegation “that JD Vance fornicated a couch” has been “[introduced] into the bloodstream.”

Trump and Vance only have two bad options at this point. They can let this fester, as Google searches for “Vance couch” spike and the narrative that “Vance=sex deviant” continues to spread like a digital rash. Or they can issue a denial, something akin to “My ‘I didn’t fuck a sofa’ t-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt,” which would only lead to even more relentless mocking. Either way, much like Vance’s couch in our collective imagination, they’re completely fucked.

These things tend to take on a life of their own. At the beginning of the month, now-Democratic presumptive nominee Kamala Harris was a sidelined veep; hundreds of thousands of coconut tree tweets later, she’s being set up to be our next president. As it stands, Vance is already among the least popular Republican VP picks in history. Top Trump allies reportedly regret his selection because he doesn’t bring anything to the table and, as the salience of couchgate would suggest, he’s fairly off-putting. His past comments dragging Trump—from calling him America’s Hitler to believing the women who’ve accused Trump of sexual misconduct—keep resurfacing. His speeches keep flopping, and then going viral for flopping—I couldn’t tell you a single message this man has put out there, beyond his joke (?) that liberal elites think Diet Mountain Dew is racist. 

By contrast, Harris has been absolutely riding the meme wave, crowned a “brat” by both Charli xcx and the internet, while the candidates reportedly on her VP shortlist are all rousing enthusiastic online fanbases of their own. The internet may not be real life, but surely “good” and “bad” are real things, and galvanizing young people is “good” while sparking an AP fact-check about your maybe-sexual relations with furniture is “bad.”

For what it’s worth, I emailed the Trump-Vance campaign a request for comment on the couch allegations and the viral meme that’s swept the internet. We’ve yet to hear back, so I hope Vance didn’t accidentally drop his comment between the couch cushions.

 
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