So … What's With This Rumor That J.D. Vance Had Sex With a ...

The viral allegation that Trump's VP pick wrote about pleasuring himself between two couch cushions is funny, but false

Vice presidential hopeful JD Vance would like to be having a brat summer, but he is instead facing accusations of pushin’ the cushions of an unfortunate sofa.

Social media has been inundated with jokes and memes suggesting Vance once pleasured himself between two couch cushions. 

What goes on between a man and his couch is between him, God, and whatever sexy sectional he chooses to victimize. While we can’t definitively state that Donald Trump’s running mate has never engaged in some furniture fornication, the viral allegation that Vance wrote about having sex with a couch in his 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy is false. 

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] might be the first vp pick to have admitted in a ny times bestseller to f***ing an inside-out latex glove shoved between two couch cushions (vance, hillbilly elegy, pp. 179-181).”

While Vance’s memoir contained plenty of gross generalizations about blue-collar, working-class Appalachians, he did not actually describe a sexual tryst with a hapless piece of upholstery. 

Regardless, the claim took off with a vengeance.

Things escalated on Thursday when the Associated Press posted, then deleted, an article fact-checking the allegation. The piece was headlined: “No, JD Vance Did Not Have Sex With a Couch.” A spokesperson for the AP told Semafor that the story had been retracted because it hadn’t gone through the standard editing process at the wire service, and that the Associated Press was investigating how it made it to publication. 

While the couch-sex debacle is silly, it’s not helping Vance recover from a series of early campaign stumbles. Earlier this week, the senator was widely mocked for awkwardly joking that Democrats will accuse anything of being racist. “I had a diet Mountain Dew yesterday and one today and I’m sure they’re going to call that racist, too,” he said at a rally on Monday. 

The cringey attempt at humor has also found its way into couch-related content: 

Vance was also widely criticized 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 unfit to serve in elected office. Vance’s past comments about abortion and Trump have also been widely circulated.

The comments about Harris, in particular, were met with widespread backlash by voters, commentators, and social media users who not only pointed out that Harris has two stepchildren but that attacking childless Americans — whatever their reasons for not reproducing — as inferior was a perilous message for a party already struggling to with the issue of reproductive rights and freedoms. 

Again, we don’t know if Vance actually enjoys pushin’ the cushions, but if his concern is that the country needs to produce more children, that’s definitely not how they’re made.