The social media user who started the fake rumor about J.D. Vance and couches says the prank was inspired by a passage from Hunter S. Thompson.
The post went viral over the weekend and has been mentioned by late night hosts, Fox News broadcasters, and the Kamala Harris campaign, and it eventually attracted so much attention that the Associated Press wrote up a fact check that was later deleted, reported Business Insider.
"I have really enjoyed thinking about his team and all of the idiots associated with him having to grapple with this," said the post's author, who identified himself only as Rick. "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-f-----.'"
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Rick says he's on the political left and has a desk job that's not related to politics, and he views Donald Trump's running mate from "a place of irreverence if not outright disrespect" because he had a similar upbringing to what Vance described in "Hillbilly Elegy" but drew vastly different conclusions about social issues.
He came up with the idea for the smear while shopping at a grocery store the day the Republican vice presidential nominee was announced, and Rick insists that he never intended to spread election misinformation but instead just sees some ineffable quality in Vance that calls to mind the term "couch f-----."
Rick cites a few "highbrow" influences on the substance and phrasing of the X post, saying that he listed page numbers from "Hillbilly Elegy" that purportedly described the tryst as authors Jorge Luis Borges and John Fowles did to lend authenticity to their own fiction.
"It's something I've found funny my entire life," he said.
He also said the notion of Vance pleasuring himself using a rubber glove wedged between couch cushions reveals what Werner Herzog calls an "ecstatic truth," which the legendary filmmaker describes as "a kind of truth that is the enemy of the merely factual," encompassing falsehoods that "make some essence of the man visible."
Rick was also inspired by an apocryphal story about Lyndon Johnson, who supposedly asked a campaign manager to start a rumor that an opponent had sex with pigs.
"Christ, we can't get away with calling him a pig-f-----," the campaign manager responded, according to Hunter S. Thompson's book "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 sonofab----- deny it."
