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 A spokesperson for the AP told Semafor that the story had been retracted because it hadn’t gone through the standard editing process at the wire service, and that the Associated Press was investigating how it made it to publication.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.
War Is Peace: Trump’s Regime-Change Reversal
As American and Israeli rockets fly into Tehran, with the stated goal of regime change, anyone who bought into the self-evidently absurd idea of “Donald the Dove” ending America’s forever wars ought to be suffering from a bloody form of buyer’s remorse.
It was always bullshit. But that’s what the Trump team was selling hard. Take human ghoul Stephen Miller’s tweet days before the election: “Kamala = WWIII. Trump = Peace.”
The Trump team reads George Orwell’s 1984 like an owner’s manual and so of course “war is peace.” Their undermining of NATO and the dismantling of American alliances in favor of a “might makes right” foreign policy executed by a sycophantic kakistocracy is a guarantee of more war amid autocratic power grabs worldwide, with a side order of corrupt crony capitalism to profit from the chaos.
If you voted for Trump and believed him, this is on you. And that includes self-styled Palestinian peace activists who thought that Biden and Harris were the worst of all possible worlds and stayed home. We will no doubt see protests for the innocent lives lost in these strikes — but I’d have a lot more time for those folks if they were also seen protesting the estimated 20,000 to 30,000 Iranian lives snuffed out by murderous mullahs in the last few months alone.
The Islamic Republic of Iran has been despotic and dangerous from its inception. The Iranian people have been oppressed and denied basic freedoms for decades. But this is an extreme example of a war of choice. The American military strikes against Iran’s nuclear weapons facility last year were justified because Iran cannot be trusted with a nuclear weapon. That is true. But the much trumpeted total obliteration of those facilities is apparently not true — or so goes the justification for this war. And don’t forget that it was Trump who pulled the U.S. out of an Obama-era deal to stop Iran from developing weapons — arguing absurdly that the imperfect anti-nuke deal needed to be blown up to stop Iran from developing a bomb. Iran’s subsequent progress toward a bomb then created the rationale toward these strikes. This is a self-inflicted state of emergency. Peace is war and war is peace.
Pity the willful dupes in Congress who deluded themselves into thinking that Trump deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. They’ll probably rationalize that he would’ve been peaceful if he got the honor. Now it will be read as a cautionary tale for not sucking up. The chairman of the Board of Peace is now bored of peace. While Rand Paul remains admirably consistent, it’s Lindsey Graham who is pirouetting around the Senate floor while the Gimp Speaker Mike Johnson is unable to speak for the basic constitutional principles of separation of powers let alone authorization to go to war.
If you’re feeling shell-shocked trying to keep up with Operation Epstein Distraction, get ready for the inevitable next crisis — regime change without a plan for replacement. This is what the Trump administration did in Venezuela — kidnapping the socialist dictator Maduro but keeping his regime in place in exchange for crude oil access. The opposition is still in exile and its leader María Corina Machado gave her Nobel Peace Prize to Trump in exchange for exactly nothing.
One of the clear lessons of history is that if you don’t win the peace, you don’t win the war. The Saudis and their Sunni allies will back the U.S. and Iran because they hate the Shia Iranians (who, incidentally, are not Arabs), but beyond removing the Iranian regime, the plans for replacement and stabilization seem TBD — and with Trump’s inability to stay focused on anything beyond his immediate self-interest, solid plans are unlikely to emerge. Maybe a leader will come from the underground opposition; maybe it will be the Shah’s son, who has been living in the U.S. waiting for a restoration like many members of the diaspora. The upside is that Iran has a distinguished history and an accomplished Persian culture: The Islamists don’t represent the entirety of the people of Iran and never have.
But the path ahead will be messy at best. It will require concerted effort and civil commitment, not just an open call for private investment from Mar-a-Lago members. If the United States is now kidnapping and killing dictators without direct provocation, it establishes a dangerous precedent which will come back to bite us after demolishing our moral authority in the world.
It is the unexpected effects, the cascades of consequence where we cannot always plan ahead, that cause most responsible statesmen to try to keep the peace. But Trump has the carelessness of a rich-boy bully who can always buy or bluster his way out of trouble. He’s a con man who has found his ultimate mark in his followers, who fool themselves into thinking that a reflexive liar is the one man with the courage to tell the truth.
Perhaps the most prominent example is the vice president himself — a bright guy who not that long ago compared Trump to Hitler and a deadly narcotic but then convinced himself that careerism demanded an abrupt conversion. After all, he endorsed Trump less than two years ago with this very serious column headlined “Trump’s Best Foreign Policy? Not Starting Any Wars,” explaining, “He has my support in 2024 because I know he won’t recklessly send Americans to fight overseas.”