It takes so little to create a news cycle: a rumor, maybe, and it doesn't even have to be a good one. Rumors are always outside in the wind being picked up and cast about, being swirled, flying, spreading. One tweet gets cast out into the universe—a whisper of drama, a promise of misbehavior—and suddenly there are memes everywhere, and the AP is weighing in, and Snopes has to publish a fact-check over whether or not Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance has ever fucked a couch.
On July 15, the day Donald Trump announced Vance as his running mate, Twitter account @rickrudescalves tweeted:
can't say for sure but he might be the first vp to have admitted in a nytimes bestseller to fucking an inside-out latex glove shoved between two couch cushions. (vance hillbilly elegy, pp. 179-181)
This is a perfect fabrication. There are so many details: "nytimes bestseller," "latex glove," "shoved." It's so descriptive! The faux-academic reference citation to Vance's career-making 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy makes it even stronger. But it is absolutely made up. @Rickrudescalves (who has since gone private) immediately tweeted the "go on the internet and tell lies" meme after this one.
That didn't stop it. Some wildfires spread too fast to be stopped. The tweet was the spark that caught, and now it's everywhere. The Associated Press published an article yesterday titled "No, JD Vance Did Not Have Sex With a Couch." As of this morning, that post has been deleted. According to Semafor's Maxwell Tani, an AP spokesperson told him that "this story didn’t go through the wire service’s standard editing process, and the AP is looking into how it was published."
Fact-checking is a complicated, beautiful art. It would make sense for the AP to remove the article in question, because a claim as broad as "JD Vance did not have sex with a couch" cannot be fact-checked. The AP can report with authority that Vance does not write about fucking a couch in his book Hillbilly Elegy. It can even assert that Vance has not publicly announced that he fucks couches. But we cannot verify that he has never fucked a couch. We would have to take him at his word—which, based on all his other words, would be a very bad idea—and couches cannot speak.
The word "couch" appears eight times in Hillbilly Elegy. Vance writes that his grandfather sleeps on the couch, that Bob sits on the couch, that Mamaw retires to the couch, that Mom collapsed onto the couch, that Mom spent a few months on Mamaw's couch, and that someone was found unconscious on their couch. On page 78 he writes, "I was exhausted and wanted only to lie on the couch and watch TV." It is not my business how you choose to interpret that.
What I can tell you for sure is that none of these words appear in Hillbilly Elegy:
- sofa
- chesterfield
- pull-out
- settee
- love seat
- loveseat
- sectional
- futon
- chaise
- divan
- daybed
- sleeper
- latex
- glove
- gloves
- honesty
- mid-century
- Ashley
- cushion
- upholstery
- davenport
- Basset Southwest
- La-Z-boy
- Restoration Hardware
- IKEA
- intersectional
There is an old (unverified) legend about President Lyndon B. Johnson that I grew up believing: Once, in a race that LBJ felt was closer than it should have been, he told his campaign manager to start a rumor that his opponent was fucking a pig. As the story has it, the manager balked, saying that no one would believe this man had fucked a pig. But that wasn't the point. "I know," LBJ maybe said. "I just want to make him deny it.” It's a political play on the illusory truth effect. The more people hear a lie, the more they believe it. Repeat something enough, and people will believe you. This play later definitively worked against former British prime minister David Cameron. As people say in D.C.: If you're denying, you're losing.
As of publication, JD Vance has not yet denied fucking a couch.
