J.D. Vance Faces Most Embarrassing Rumor (and Fact-Check) of His Life

Now that Senator J.D. Vance is Donald Trump’s running mate, he’s the subject of an internet rumor that he had sex with couch cushions in his younger days.

The rumors were so prevalent that Snopes and the Associated Press both were forced to debunk the tale. As the fact-checkers note, the rumor appears to have originated from an X post on July 15 from user rickrudescalves, who has since protected his account.

The rumor was that Vance told the story in his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, but, as the AP and Snopes found, there is no such story in the book. That didn’t stop the rumor from spreading across the internet, even being picked up by actress and comedian Kathy Griffin.

Curiously, the AP took down its fact-check Thursday morning, spurring internet users to joke about how even the global news outlet can’t confidently rule it was a lie.

While there’s an old expression that “any publicity is good publicity,” Vance probably wants this embarrassing rumor to go away. Unfortunately for him, the subsequent fact-checks have extended its life, and the Trump-Vance campaign may soon have to deal with questions asking about it.

Even if the rumor does eventually go away, there are plenty of other negative stories about Vance that are backed up by facts. The Trump campaign has tried in vain to distance itself from the conservative playbook Project 2025, but Vance happened to write the foreword to a book by the plan’s lead author, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts. He is using his campaign speeches to praise Diet Mountain Dew, and he has a long record of criticizing Trump that is being unearthed every day. Plus, he has ties to tech moguls with disturbing ideas about reordering society.

After President Biden withdrew from the 2024 election and handed the reins to Vice President Kamala Harris earlier this week, the Trump campaign is reportedly second-guessing the decision to bring on Vance as Trump’s running mate. Embarrassing rumors certainly won’t quell these discussions within the campaign. Then again, there are several embarrassing stories of Trump that have been floating around for years.

The Kamala Harris campaign released its first promotional video Thursday morning, titled “We choose freedom.” And it highlights one of Donald Trump’s favorite photos: his mugshot.

Soundtracked to Beyoncé’s 2016 song “Freedom,” the campaign ad alternates between footage of Harris, her supporters, and B-roll footage, over which the vice president and 2024 candidate says, “In this election we each face a question: What kind of country do we want to live in?”

Cutting to footage of Trump and J.D. Vance, Harris’s voiceover continues, “There are some people who think we should be a country of chaos, of fear, of hate. But us, we choose something different. We choose freedom.”

It also mentions choosing “a future where … no one is above the law,” at which point the video cuts to Trump’s 2023 Fulton County Jail mug shot—an image the Trump campaign itself has used on its website and merchandise—as well as a flurry of news headlines, timed to the soundtrack’s percussion, about his recent 34 felony convictions.

The video emphasizes a number of other issues one can expect to be key points of Harris’s campaign, including reproductive freedom, gun violence, childhood poverty, and affordable health care.

The ad closes with Harris saying, “We believe in the promise of America, and we’re ready to fight for it. Because when we fight we win.” It echoes themes that Harris, who entered the 2024 race after Biden’s exit just earlier this week, introduced at her first rally on Wednesday, where she said the upcoming election is “a choice between freedom and chaos.”

Donald Trump appeared to confuse Vice President Kamala Harris and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley during a rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Wednesday night.

At his first rally since President Joe Biden endorsed Harris for the candidacy, Trump attempted to give his “radical” new opponent his full attention—but he couldn’t seem to muster the specifics necessary to actually attack her policies.

At one point, he appeared to mix her up with another Indian female politician.

“And you know, they’re talking about, he was talking about, she was talking about re—lifting the retirement age,” Trump said. Only, that policy is not part of Harris’s platform. It was a part of Haley’s, though.

The former president worked his way through a few other strange moments onstage Wednesday. At one point, he appeared to forget the word “abortion,” and pivoted to audience participation.

“She’s also a total radical on a word called im-bo—you know this right? A word called what? Abortion,” Trump said.

And of course, the bit that needs no introduction: Trump once again gave a shout-out to his favorite serial killer, while claiming immigrants had entered the country from “prisons, jails, and insane asylums.”

“You know they go crazy when I say ‘the late great Hannibal Lecter.’ They say, ‘Why would he mention Hannibal Lecter, he must be cognitively in trouble,’” Trump said. “No. These are real stories. Hannibal Lecter from Silence of the Lamb.”

Donald Trump’s Republican allies are worried that he might be underestimating Vice President Kamala Harris.

According to a report from Rolling Stone, several Republicans, including two right-wing lawmakers, have reached out to the convicted felon and former president to warn him about internal GOP polls that show Harris could make key states that Trump needs a lot more difficult to win. They also told him that assurances from his team that Harris was a weak opponent were wrong and that racist and sexist attacks from the right wing could easily backfire.

The report cites three sources, one of whom told the magazine that “when Joe Biden was in the race, we were headed for a Trump landslide.”

“Now that it’s Kamala’s turn, there are some scenarios that make me nervous,” said the source, who has discussed the issue with Trump.

Before Biden withdrew from the 2024 election and endorsed Harris, Trump was ahead in national and battleground state polls, particularly after Biden’s poor debate performance. Since Biden’s announcement Sunday, though, Trump has raged on Truth Social and Harris has skyrocketed in popularity, raising record amounts of money. Trump’s supporters are openly panicking, making weak attempts at impeaching Harris in the House and resorting to racist attacks.

Will any of that work in the face of growing enthusiasm for Harris from young people? The boost to the Democrats’ flagging fortunes even has the Trump campaign wondering if J.D. Vance was the wrong choice to be Trump’s running mate. Harris already has hit Trump with some smart attacks in the last couple of days, and Trump seems to be scared of debating her. Harris’s next move would be to pick a good running mate of her own, preferably one who won’t alienate her base while still assuring swing voters.

Donald Trump once said that people with severe disabilities were better off dead, according to his nephew’s forthcoming memoir.

In an excerpt from All in the Family: The Trumps and How We Got This Way that was published in Time Wednesday, Fred C. Trump III detailed two disgraceful comments made by the former president, one of which was about Fred’s own son William, who was born with a KCNQ2 mutation. As a result, William suffered from infantile spasms, a seizure disorder that affected his physical and cognitive development.

In May 2020, Fred attended a meeting with Trump at the White House alongside several health advocates, as well as Trump’s former Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar and Brett Giroir, the former assistant secretary for health. At first, things were going well.

“The meeting I had assumed would be a quick handshake hello with Donald had turned into a 45-minute discussion in the Oval Office,” Fred wrote. “Donald seemed engaged, especially when several people in our group spoke about the heart-wrenching and expensive efforts they’d made to care for their profoundly disabled family members, who were constantly in and out of the hospital and living with complex arrays of challenges.”

After the meeting concluded, however, Trump called his nephew back in to speak with him.

“I thought he had been touched by what the doctor and advocates in the meeting had just shared about their journey with their patients and their own family members,” Fred wrote. “But I was wrong.”

He recalled his uncle’s words to him: “‘Those people …’ Donald said, trailing off. ‘The shape they’re in, all the expenses, maybe those kinds of people should just die.’” Fred wrote that he hadn’t known how to respond to the former president’s comment, so he quickly left.

But Trump’s callous, inhuman attitude toward Americans with disabilities did not end there. Fred recounted a later interaction with his uncle, where he had called the former president to ask for help buoying the fund that supported his son’s care.

Fred wrote that his uncle didn’t seem convinced. “‘I don’t know,’ he finally said, letting out a sigh. ‘He doesn’t recognize you. Maybe you should just let him die and move down to Florida.’

“Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised to hear Donald say that. It wasn’t far off from what he’d said that day in the Oval Office after our meeting with the advocates. Only that time, it was other people’s children who should die. This time, it was my son,” Fred wrote.

This time, Fred hit back, he wrote. “‘No, Donald,’ I said. ‘He does recognize me.’”

Some online have compared Trump’s despicable comments to Hitler, who began systematically exterminating children with physical and mental disabilities.

In his new book, Fred also claimed that his uncle repeatedly used the n-word during a racist tirade over some damage to his Cadillac convertible.