J.D. Vance Gives Off Couch Sex Vibes, Says Man Who Started Joke

The swirling clouds of internet mayhem have parted, and the user behind the rumor that J.D. Vance once got sexual with a sectional has finally broken his silence.

In an interview with Business Insider, “Rick,” or @rickrudescalves (he’s since changed his username for privacy), explained why exactly he was inspired to invent a semi-believable lie that Donald Trump’s running mate had made love to a loveseat.

The day that Trump announced that Vance would be joining his ticket, Rick tweeted, “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).”

The story? A work of fiction by a disappointed guy from a working-class background. Rick, a desk worker who said he had a similar upbringing to that which Vance described in his bestselling book, Hillbilly Elegy, said he regarded the Ohio senator from “a place of irreverence if not outright disrespect.”

The page numbers? Plucked from thin air. Rick was referring to authors such as Jorge Luis Borges and John Fowles, who cooked up phony citations to lend literary credibility to their fictional works. “It’s something I’ve found funny my entire life,” Rick said.

Rick’s reasoning for this particular fabrication? He was inspired by Hunter S. Thompson’s anecdote in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 about former President Lyndon Johnson starting a rumor that his opponent had sex with his livestock.

“Christ, we can’t get away with calling him a pig-fucker,” the campaign manager protested. “Nobody’s going to believe a thing like that.”

“I know,” Johnson replied. “But let’s make the sonofabitch deny it.”

When the rumor took off, Rick was surprised and a little overwhelmed. He hid the post within a week, but by then, the idea had already spread like wildfire, with news organizations rushing to fact-check and then subsequently backing off.

Rick pointed to director Werner Herzog’s “ecstatic truth,” which Herzog describes as “a kind of truth that is the enemy of the merely factual.” During an interview on Late Night With Seth Meyers in 2022, Herzog admitted that in capturing his protagonist he “would invent a few things to make the essence of the man visible.”

By inventing a story about Vance having sex with a couch, this anonymous internet user had made the vice presidential nominee’s essence as a “couch-fucker” all the more visible.

For his part, Vance hasn’t exactly dodged the baseless rumors and appears to be making absolutely no effort to avoid the gaffe. At a rally on Tuesday, Vance made an awkward joke about getting in trouble with his wife, Usha, and being banished to the couch for the night.

This story has been updated.

Donald Trump’s interview with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham Tuesday veered into a bizarre exchange on gender pronouns, in a moment that’s now making the rounds online.

“Kamala Harris, in her Twitter bio, which I’ve never noticed until this morning, states her pronouns as she/her,” Ingraham said. “What are your pronouns?”

“I have no—I don’t want pronouns,” the former president replied. “I don’t want pronouns, I saw that.”

“So you’re fluid?” Igraham joked.

“Nobody even knows what that means,” Trump replied.

The clip is circulating widely online, with some embracing the reactionary Fox News host as an “accidental ally,” and others jokingly interpreting Trump’s response as a brave rejection of gender conformity. One X user posted, “This is the first time Laura Ingraham has been funny and I applaud her for it.”

The exchange shows that right-wing figures are committed to their yearslong performative bafflement about the existence of gender pronouns. Ingraham asked, “What is that? Why are people doing that?” but her question and admittedly quick-witted follow-up about gender fluidity betray the act. And Ingraham’s claim that she hadn’t noticed Harris’s bio on X (formerly Twitter) previously shows just how unnewsworthy the subject is.

The exchange may be best understood, then, as an attempt on Ingraham’s part to offer a riposte to Democrats’ latest line of attack against Trump, J.D. Vance, and Republicans’ off-putting social agenda—calling them “weird”—which was the subject of the interviewer’s next question. To that point, Vance used a clip of Harris saying her pronouns at a 2019 CNN town hall to deflect from the “weird” charge on X Sunday.

In an interview on Fox News Tuesday, Donald Trump tried to respond to the criticisms coming from Democrats and Vice President Kamala Harris that he and the GOP are “weird.”

He didn’t succeed, instead responding by simply calling Harris “weird” back.

“The whole thing is a con job. ‘Just plain weird.’ You know who’s plain weird? She’s plain weird. She’s a weird person. Look at her past, look at what she does, and look at what she used to say about herself,” Trump said in the long, meandering interview with Laura Ingraham.

“I won’t get into it, what she used to say and who she was compared to what she said starting at about 2016,” Trump added.

Trump is probably referring to when Harris ran for the Senate in California in 2016, but what he’s saying about “what she used to say” is unclear. Perhaps he’s referring to her past as a district attorney and California attorney general prior to then, making a racist attack on her record on crime. Or perhaps he’s drawing on the “Jezebel” attacks on her from other Republicans, who are trying to use her previous relationships against her.

Either way, “I’m not weird, you are” doesn’t work on school playgrounds and it’s not likely to work as a reply to Democrats. Senator Marco Rubio tried using it Tuesday, and was mocked online. Republicans can’t seem to come up with an answer to what surprisingly has been one of the Democrats’ most effective attack lines in years, trying and failing each time. It’s surprising that Democrats didn’t try it out years ago, considering the weird turn that conservatives have taken. Democratic momentum just keeps growing, and the more the right tries to deny their weirdness, the more people make the association.

Donald Trump lashed out at Vice President Kamala Harris after she held a star-studded rally Tuesday in Atlanta.

At the campaign’s largest rally to date, 10,000 people gathered at Georgia State University to hear Harris speak, alongside former Georgia state Representative Stacey Abrams and Senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock.

The rally also featured a performance from rapper Megan Thee Stallion and a surprise appearance from rapper Quavo. The response from the crowd was enthusiastic. Apparently, Trump wasn’t too happy.

“Crazy Kamala Harris, voted the WORST Vice President in American history, needed a concert to bring people into the Atlanta arena, and they started leaving 5 minutes into her speech. I don’t need concerts or entertainers, I just have to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!” Trump wrote on TruthSocial.

Big words from the guy who brought out Kid Rock at the Republican National Convention. Not to mention Hulk Hogan, or right-wing country star Jason Aldean, who was sitting right next to Trump before his big speech.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttegieg called those RNC appearances out for what they are: hollow attempts to appear populist. And, sadly for the celebrity-obsessed Trump, Republicans just don’t seem to have the roster of big names in entertainment that the Democrats have at their fingertips.

Meanwhile, Harris’s decision to tap Megan Thee Stallion and Quavo was strategic too. Democrats are hopeful that Harris can right the party’s ship in Atlanta by capturing the support of young, nonwhite, and college-educated voters to close the gap in Georgia, according to The Washington Post.

If the huge turnout to Harris’s rally is any indication, she seems to be motivating a lot of excitement in the state that delivered President Joe Biden his narrowest victory in 2020.

A false rumor has been circulating online that claims Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance once performed a sexual act with a couch. Why, then, did the Ohio senator make a couch joke at a rally in Nevada?

On Tuesday night, Vance decided to bring up sofas while speaking about his wife, Usha.

“Now, I would call her up here to come and speak, but then I think I’d have to sleep on the couch tonight, so I’ll leave her alone,” Vance said.

The joke only got some tepid laughter, and plenty of mockery online.

This is not likely to help Vance and Republicans fight the assertion that they’re weird, as the Democrats keep saying. The attack line is working, and driving the GOP insane. Republicans still haven’t come up with a good comeback for it, and right-wing media can’t handle it either. Trump can’t really explain why he chose the Ohio senator as his running mate (it was reportedly to shore up his white male base), and some Republicans are starting to regret the choice. If Vance wants the “weird” attacks to go away and improve his standing, he can’t make slipups like this.

Senator Marco Rubio tried to come up with a comeback to Democrats’ criticisms of Donald Trump and the Republican Party as “weird,” and it’s rather lame.

“They called us weird so I’ll call them weirder. That’s what I used to do back in high school,” Rubio told HuffPost’s Igor Bobic on Tuesday.

Naturally, this immediately drew mockery online.

It’s not really a surprise that Rubio’s attempt to respond was lackluster. He had no answer when Trump called him “Little Marco” during the 2016 presidential campaign. In fact, Rubio tried to land an insult about Trump’s small hands back then, only for it to go nowhere.

Rubio, like other Republicans, can’t seem to come up with an answer to what surprisingly has been one of the Democrats’ most effective attack lines in years, trying and failing each time. It’s one that’s been a long time coming, considering the weird turn that conservatives such as Trump and J.D. Vance have taken in the last few years.

And every day, Republicans say something new to strengthen the argument, whether it’s getting triggered by the Olympics or complaining about “childless cat ladies.” Basically, they can’t stop owning themselves.

It looks like Donald Trump may be heading back to court before the polls open in November, and he’ll once again be going head-to-head with author E. Jean Carroll.

A federal appeals court has scheduled oral arguments for September 6, as part of Trump’s appeal of the May 2023 verdict in his first trial against Carroll. At the time, a jury unanimously found Trump liable for defamation and sexual abuse, and ordered him to pay her $5 million.

Lawyers for Carroll had filed a motion to a federal appeals court in May this year to expedite Trump’s appeal, arguing that Trump would use his campaign as an excuse not to sit in court.

“Donald J. Trump has demonstrated a clear pattern of dilatory, obstructionist, and bad faith conduct throughout these proceedings,” the motion said. “With the pendency of the general presidential election campaign (which will intensify in the fall), not to mention several active state and federal criminal proceedings, Mr. Trump may well contend that any oral argument scheduled for later in 2024 must be deferred until early 2025—at which point he could be preparing for an inauguration or awaiting another criminal trial.”

While Trump will likely try to worm his way out of the very proceedings he requested, it seems like some people are very much looking forward to it.

“I AM READY!!!!” Carroll wrote in a post on X (formerly Twitter).

In January, Trump paid a hefty bond and filed to appeal the verdict in his other case against Carroll, after a jury ordered that he fork out a whopping $83 million to the author for repeatedly defaming her.

If oral arguments proceed as planned, they will take place less than two weeks before the former president is scheduled to attend a sentencing hearing for his 34-count criminal conviction in his hush-money case.

However, the judge in that case, New York State Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan, suggested that Trump’s sentencing may not come to pass due to the Supreme Court’s recent decision to grant Trump presidential immunity for “official acts,” which may have potentially rendered some evidence inadmissible.

As expected, the Senate hearing on Donald Trump’s assassination attempt got heated.

Secret Service acting Director Ronald Rowe testified Tuesday before the Senate Judiciary and the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committees about security failures at Trump’s rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

Senator Ted Cruz, of course, attempted to escalate the hearing and make it a partisan affair, yelling and interrupting Rowe as he spoke.

“Hold on, you are using ‘president’ in a way that’s not clear,” Cruz interjected. “Is it your testimony that in Butler, Pennsylvania, Donald Trump had the same number of agents protecting him that Joe Biden has at a comparable event?”

Someone should probably remind Cruz that Trump is not the sitting president, and therefore does not receive the same number of agents. Rowe stepped up to be that someone.

“Senator, there is a difference between the sitting president of the United States,” an exasperated Rowe began before a screaming Cruz interrupted again.

“What’s the difference?” Cruz asked.

“National command authority to launch a nuclear strike,” answered Rowe. The exchange only escalated further until the two men were yelling over each other.

“Stop interrupting me,” Cruz ironically responded at one point. “You are refusing to answer clear and direct questions.”

Cruz was not the only Republican politician to raise his voice at the hearing. “Fire somebody,” Senator Josh Hawley shouted, to which Rowe replied: “We have to be able to have a proper investigation into this.”

Former Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned following the July 13 shooting.

The director of Project 2025, Paul Dans, announced Tuesday that he is stepping down from his role.

The move comes after a wave of public criticism, led by Democrats, over the conservative manifesto and the Heritage Foundation, the think tank that backs it. The project’s agenda items include everything from the dismantling of government agencies, such as the Department of Education, to the implementation of national abortion bans and contraception restrictions.

Dans said in his email that others on the project’s team will continue to push for its implementation in a conservative presidential campaign, and that he will be directing his efforts toward “winning, bigly!” in November. He also told Heritage Foundation staff earlier this week about his departure.

Thanks to the increased public attention on the project, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has attempted to distance himself from the 900-page document. According to Roger Sollenberger at The Daily Beast, Dans’s departure comes after pressure from the Trump campaign, partially due to a power struggle for control over staffing in a possible Trump presidential administration.

This would seem to align with what Trump campaign officials have said publicly. One of Trump’s campaign managers, Chris LaCivita, recently called Project 2025 a “pain in the ass.” The Wall Street Journal reports that Trump is annoyed that it has received so much attention, and he resents the implication that the project is behind his policies and choosing his presidential staff.

On Tuesday, after the news of Dans’s resignation spread, the Trump campaign celebrated in an email written by LaCavita and co-campaign manager Susie Wiles.

Bizarrely, Dans’s departure seems to be yet more evidence of Trump’s influence on Project 2025. Vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance also has connections to the project, and Trump’s decision to make him his running mate made one of its key architects, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, very happy.

The move will likely do little to halt Democratic attacks against Project 2025, particularly as those behind it say that their efforts will continue. It’s one of the many weird things that Democrats are successfully tying to the GOP, who are having a tough time convincing voters that any of their policies are normal.

Former President Donald Trump on Tuesday backed up a blatantly antisemitic claim about Vice President Kamala Harris’s husband.

During an interview on WABC 77’s radio show Sid & Friends in the Morning, Trump agreed with host Sid Rosenberg, who criticized Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, on the basis of his faith.

“They tell me that this Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, Mr. President, is Jewish,” Rosenberg said. “He’s Jewish like Bernie Sanders is Jewish. Are you kidding me? He’s a crappy Jew, he’s a horrible Jew!”

“Yes, yes,” Trump replied under Rosenberg’s rant. As Trump made perfectly clear throughout the interview, to him, the only good Jewish person is one who’s voting Republican.

During the interview, Trump repeated his old attack against Jewish Americans who refused to support his presidential bid.

“Any Jewish person that voted for her, or him, or whoever it’s going to be, I assume it’s going to be her; anybody that did that should have their head examined,” Trump said. “If you love Israel, or if you’re Jewish—because a lot of Jewish people do not like Israel, and they happen to be in New York, you know that?”

“Yes,” chirped Rosenberg, whose radio talk show is local to New York City.

“If you are Jewish,” Trump continued, “regardless of Israel, if you’re Jewish, if you vote for a Democrat you’re a fool. An absolute fool.”

Trump has previously suggested that any Jewish person who did not vote for him “does not love Israel” and “should be spoken to.” The former president seems to have a pretty limited idea of what a Jewish person can and cannot think. He also claimed in March that “any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion.”

On Tuesday, Trump complained that Democrats no longer felt afraid to criticize Israel.

“You know, 15 years ago the strongest lobby in all of Washington was Israel. It was by far the strongest. Nobody would say anything bad about Israel! Today, it’s like nobody says anything good—except for Republicans by the way,” Trump griped.

While the American Israel Public Affairs Committee is not the biggest lobby in U.S. politics, its impact is still felt in crucial races. Earlier this year, AIPAC gave a whopping $14.5 million in the New York Democratic primary election to George Latimer, funding his ultimately successful effort to unseat progressive Representative Jamaal Bowman, a staunch critic of Israel.

During the radio interview, Trump also claimed that Harris looked uncomfortable during her meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which he said suggested that she secretly dislikes Jewish people—despite being married to one, of course.

“You can see the disdain,” Trump said. “Number one, she doesn’t like Israel. Number two, she doesn’t like Jewish people. You know it, I know it, and everybody knows it and nobody wants to say it.”

Trump’s lack of logic on this subject is nothing new. The Republican presidential nominee has previously asserted that Joe Biden and the Democratic Party had “abandoned” Israel, despite the fact that the U.S. has continued to fund Israel’s deadly military campaign in Gaza, which has killed at least 40,000 Palestinians and created an ever-worsening humanitarian crisis.