Anna Moneymaker/Getty Image; iStock; Rebecca Zisser/BI
The American electorate is fully in the grip of Couch Discourse.
On July 15, shortly after Donald Trump announced JD Vance would be joining the ticket, user @rickrudescalves posted a joke on X: "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)."
Needless to say, pages 179 through 181 of "Hillbilly Elegy" are not devoted to an account of Vance's couch-surfing, and there is no evidence that he's ever done anything to a couch other than sit on one.
Still, a lot of people found it funny. @rickrudescalves hid the post within a week of publishing it, but the couch joke had already left an impression.
Over the past week, for every seven people searching Google for "JD Vance," one person has searched "JD Vance couch," according to Google Trends. Memes of Vance fantasizing about living room furnishings have flooded the internet. Despite being, very obviously, a joke, the post was debunked in two fact-checks by mainstream media outlets — one by Snopes, and one by the Associated Press (which later deleted the fact-check from its website). Foreseeably and perversely, those debunkings propelled Couch Discourse into the mainstream.
The rumor's spread has also heralded a new style of online engagement from Democrats. In marked contrast to the Obama-era decorum of "when they go low, we go high," Vice President Kamala Harris' campaign has embraced a tongue-in-cheek tone, including writing on X that "JD Vance does not couch his hatred for women."
Couch Discourse even made it to TV. "Where does someone even get an idea like that?" Late Show host Stephen Colbert asked last week.
In a grocery store, the author of the post told Business Insider. In a phone conversation this weekend, he said the idea had struck him while he was shopping the day Vance was announced as Trump's running mate.
Business Insider tracked down the post's author, who we'll call Rick, in keeping with his former X screen name, @rickrudescalves. He changed his X screen name and protected his account last week because he was uncomfortable with the amount of attention the post generated. He asked not to be named because he's not authorized by his employer to speak with the media, but Business Insider has confirmed his identity.
Rick does not work in politics. He has a desk job. He is on the political left, and said he views Vance from "a place of irreverence if not outright disrespect," in part because he shares an upbringing not dissimilar to the hard-knock childhood Vance described in "Hillbilly Elegy." The political conclusions he drew from those experiences, though, differ markedly from Vance's, he said.
The fact that so many people across the political spectrum appeared to believe his post to be true hasn't bolstered his faith in the critical-thinking skills of the electorate, Rick said — though he accepts that blame for the misapprehension starts with him. "In terms of media literacy, and those kinds of things, I guess I was already in the mud rolling around," he said.
He is mildly concerned that he's now viewed as peddling election misinformation, which, he said, was not his intent. He posted what he posted, he said, because he sees in Vance an ineffable quality he believes is best approximated with the moniker "couch-fucker."
"I have really enjoyed thinking about his team and all of the idiots associated with him having to grapple with this," Rick said. "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.'"
Rick is not the first person to post an absurd joke that ended up roiling political circles after flying over too many heads. In 2016, a Twitter user posted that they "love working at the post office in Columbus, Ohio, and ripping up absentee ballots that vote for Trump." The Gateway Pundit and Rush Limbaugh gave the post credulous coverage, eliciting a statement from the U.S. Postal Service and, eventually, an FBI investigation.
Perhaps, Rick said, whether Vance actually had carnal knowledge of one or more couches is immaterial. Rick suggested Vance making love to a couch may best be viewed as what Werner Herzog has described as the "ecstatic truth" — in Herzog's words, "a kind of truth that is the enemy of the merely factual," encompassing falsehoods that "make some essence of the man visible."
As for his decision to include a fake citation in a tweet about a man having sex with a couch, Rick claims highbrow inspiration. "Not to egghead it up," he said, but he was an English major "and I do have certain literary tastes." Listing page numbers was "in the vein of" authors Jorge Luis Borges and John Fowles, who used excerpts and citations, real and invented, to lend an air of authenticity to their fiction. "It's something I've found funny my entire life," he said.
He said he was also inspired by an anecdote about former President Lyndon Johnson, who apocryphally asked a campaign manager to invent a rumor that one of Johnson's political opponents liked having sex with pigs.
"Christ, we can't get away with calling him a pig-fucker," the campaign manager responded, journalist Hunter S. Thompson recounted in "Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72." "Nobody's going to believe a thing like that."
"I know," Johnson replied. "But let's make the sonofabitch deny it."
So far, as comedian John Oliver noted gleefully in a "Last Week Tonight" segment Sunday, Vance has chosen not to deny it.
A spokesperson for Vance did not respond to a request for comment.
