For the past two weeks, Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance has been mocked as someone who has sex with couches — a strange situation even in the no-holds-barred world of presidential politics.
Now the person who created the bizarre meme is coming clean to Business Insider about how he came up with the weird accusation.
Back on July 15, after Vance was announced as Donald Trump’s running mate, a social media user whose handle on X, formerly Twitter, was @rickrudescalves made a bogus post stating that Hillbilly Elegy, Vance’s bestselling book, mentioned him having sex with a “latex glove shoved between two couch cushions.”
The claim was completely made up by “Rick,” which is how Business Insider referred to the jokester to preserve his anonymity.
Although there’s no proof that Vance has had any erotic encounters with upholstered furniture, Business Insider reported that “Over the past week, for every seven people searching Google for ‘JD Vance,’ one person has searched ‘JD Vance couch,’ according to Google Trends.”
Enough people believed the joke that both Snopes and The Associated Press issued fact checks on it. (The AP’s story was later taken down, with a spokesperson telling Semafor reporter Max Tani that it “didn’t go through the wire service’s standard editing process.”)
Rick, who has since abandoned the @rickrudescalves handle on X, told Business Insider that he had a similar upbringing to Vance, but took a different path politically.
Rick thinks the meme has stuck to Vance because the Ohio Senator gives off a “couch-fucker” vibe.
“I have really enjoyed thinking about his team and all of the idiots associated with him having to grapple with this,” Rick told Business Insider. “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.’”
But with the meme’s success, Risk also voiced concern about the gullibility of the electorate, though he couched it in somewhat softer language.
“In terms of media literacy, and those kinds of things, I guess I was already in the mud rolling around,” he said, noting that he hadn’t intended to spread misinformation.
Read more at Business Insider.