On July 15, shortly after former President Donald Trump announced Sen. JD Vance would be joining his ticket, the X user @rickrudescalves posted a joke: "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's 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, "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?" the "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.
BI 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 BI has confirmed his identity.
Rick does not work in politics. He has a desk job. He's on the political left and said he viewed 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 describes 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's mildly concerned that he's now viewed as peddling election misinformation, which, he said, was not his intent. He posted what he posted, he added, 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.'"