J.D. Vance can’t seem to escape the fake rumors he once got intimate with a couch, but maybe he doesn’t want to.
Just as the weeks-long gag appeared to be dying down, the Ohio senator joked at a rally on Tuesday that his wife, Usha, may send him to sleep on the couch if he made her get on stage.
“Now, I would call her up here to come and speak,” he said, “but then I think I’d have to sleep on the couch tonight, so I’ll leave her alone.”
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Vance smiled big as he delivered the joke, which earned some tepid laughter from the crowd. Those on X had a field day with the comment, however, mocking Vance for keeping such a bizarre rumor going at a time when Vance and Donald Trump are fighting against allegations they’re “weird,” as Democrats have begun describing them.
The couch rumor spawned from a July 15 post on X, which claimed to be sourced from Vance’s memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. That post said Vance once placed a rubber glove between cushions on a couch and got intimate with the piece of furniture.
Questions about the post’s veracity led the Associated Press to fact-check it as false later that week. The AP quickly killed the story and claimed it “didn’t go through our standard editing process,” but the damage was already done. Everyone was now wondering: What’s the deal with Vance and sofas? The joke even made its way on late-night comedy shows, CNN, and Fox News.
The couch memes were steady flowing up into last weekend, but had seemingly slowed down by Tuesday—finally being buried by what’s been an incredibly busy month in U.S. politics. That is, until Vance resurrected the fake rumor himself on Tuesday.
Among the comments below a clip of Vance’s rally joke was, “A reminder that JD Vance hasn’t publicly denied the couch allegations.”
Another user on X posted: “Oh man. He’s uh. Admitting to it?”
Vance’s sofa jokes come as scores of women—including Jennifer Aniston—have criticized the senator for disparaging Americans who choose to not have kids, describing them as “sad, lonely, and pathetic.”
