Vice Presidential Candidate J.D. Vance wants to have a fun summer, but instead he faces accusations of pushing unfortunate couch cushions.
Social media has been flooded with jokes and memes suggesting that Vance once enjoyed himself between two couch cushions.
What happens between a man and his couch is between him, God, and whatever sexy group he chooses to exploit. While we can’t say definitively that Donald Trump’s running mate has never engaged in couch sex, the widely circulated claim that Vance wrote about couch sex in his 2016 memoir rural elegy It is fake.
On July 15, the day the Ohio senator was confirmed as Trump's 2024 running mate, X (formerly Twitter) user @rickrudescalves wrote that they “can't say for sure but [Vance] He may be the first vice president-elect to admit in a New York Times bestseller that he had sex with a latex glove upside down between two couch cushions (Vance, A Country Elegy, pp. 179-181).
While Vance's memoirs contained many outrageous generalizations about blue-collar workers in the Appalachians, he never actually described a sexual relationship with an unhappy piece of furniture.
Regardless, this demand has spread strongly.
Things escalated on Thursday when the Associated Press published an article fact-checking the claim, then removed it. The article was headlined: “No, J.D. Vance did not have sex with a couch.” An AP spokesperson told Semaphore that the story was pulled because it did not go through the news agency’s standard editing process, and that the AP was investigating how it got to publication.
While the couch sex scandal is ridiculous, it doesn’t help Vance recover from a series of early campaign missteps. Earlier this week, the senator was widely mocked for his awkward joke that Democrats would call anything racist. “I had a Diet Mountain Dew yesterday and another one today and I’m sure they’re going to call that racist too,” he said at a rally Monday.
The sarcastic attempt at humor has also found its way into couch-related content:
Vance also came under widespread criticism after a 2021 interview with Tucker Carlson in which he attacked Kamala Harris as a “miserable cat lady” whose lack of biological children made her ineligible for elected office. Vance's past comments on abortion and Trump have also been widely circulated.
The comments about Harris, in particular, were met with widespread backlash from voters, commentators, and social media users who not only pointed out that Harris has two adopted children, but also suggested that attacking childless Americans — whatever their reasons for not having children — as inferior was a dangerous message for a party already struggling with reproductive rights and liberties.
Again, we don't know if Vance actually enjoys pushing pillows, but if his concern is that the country needs to produce more babies, that's certainly not how they're made.
