As this year’s WWE-worthy presidential race continues to heat up, a bizarre viral rumor about Donald Trump’s running mate having sexual relations with a couch has seemingly captured more attention than the recent attempt on the ex-president’s life.
As anyone who’s online — including, most likely, the VP candidate himself — knows at this point, the couch meme centers on a phony claim from a tweet posted shortly after Trump announced that Vance was his running mate pick.
In a since-deleted tweet from July 15, the day of the announcement, an X-formerly-Twitter user joked that Vance “might be the first [VP] pick to have admitted in a [New York Times] bestseller to fucking an inside-out latex glove shoved between two couch cushions.” The tweet also included page citations from “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance’s 2016 memoir about growing up poor in rural Kentucky and Ohio.
So well-executed was this bit that it instantly took off because, as implausible and ultimately false as the premise is, it almost makes sense given the poverty porn on display in “Hillbilly Elegy.” Thus, the most unhinged political meme since the whole “Ted Cruz was the Zodiac Killer” gambit was born.
As with all the best (and worst) memes, the Vance couch story took on a life of its own soon after it dropped. After Snopes debunked the rumor — or at least verified that no such passage exists in “Hillbilly Elegy” — the Associated Press took it on for size. Being a fundamentally different news outlet from Snopes, however, the AP tried to do the impossible: verify that the Ohio senator has never had sex with a couch. Soon after, it retracted the story, jettisoning the meme into supernova status.
Memes are, by definition, simple slices of information that spread rapidly among a population. Because only the most terminally online people are aware of the context surrounding the bizarre-yet-believable claim that a bestselling author wrote about having sex with a couch, lots of folks are clearly trying to figure out what in tarnation it all means — and that’s where Google comes in.
When comparing search terms on Google Trends, the search giant’s comparative analytics tool, Futurism found that this week, searches for “JD Vance couch” have skyrocketed far past searches for “Trump shooting.”
By July 23, the day Google Trends says “JD Vance couch” overtook “Trump shooting” in search frequency, there had already been so much news about the ex-president’s assassination attempt that all the air had been taken out of the story.
By contrast, the Vance couch story had at that point not been touched by any national media outlets aside from Snopes. Add in the lasciviousness of the rumor at its core, the outrageous frequency of social media posts about it, and the indelible upswing of voter fervor following the shocking changes at the top of the Democratic ticket and you’ve got, to put it mildly, a hell of a meme storm.
Though the seven-day snapshot of the comparative search frequency paints a hilarious picture, extending that timeline even by a few days tells a different story — one of a history-making act of political violence that was smothered to death by media and campaigns capitalizing upon it.
Despite the viral frenzy surrounding the Vance couch meme, this instance of a viral joke momentarily drowning out an assassination attempt during an era of extreme division and discord will almost certainly be forgotten by history.
That is, unless Trump or one of his cronies decides to talk about it publicly.
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