In order to clarify and push back on the viral stories about JD Vance and his couch, this objective journalistic work is intended to answer your questions:

SEXY SETTEE

So … What's With This Rumor That J.D. Vance Had Sex With a Couch?

The viral allegation that Trump's VP pick wrote about pleasuring himself between two couch cushions is funny, but false

VICE PRESIDENTIAL HOPEFUL JD Vance would like to be having a brat summer, but he is instead facing accusations of pushin' the cushions of an unfortunate sofa.

Social media has been inundated with jokes and memes suggesting Vance once pleasured himself between two couch cushions.

What goes on between a man and his couch is between him, God, and whatever sexy sectional he chooses to victimize. While we can't definitively state that Donald Trump's running mate has never engaged in some furniture fornication, the viral allegation that Vance wrote about having sex with a couch in his 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy is false.

On July 15, the day the Ohio senator was confirmed as Trump's 2024 running mate, X (formerly Twitter) user @rickrudescalves wrote that they "can't say for sure but [Vance] might be the first vp pick to have admitted in a ny times bestseller to f***ing an inside-out latex glove shoved between two couch cushions (vance, hillbilly elegy, pp. 179-181)."

While Vance's memoir contained plenty of gross generalizations about blue-collar, working-class Appalachians, he did not actually describe a sexual tryst with a hapless piece of upholstery.

Regardless, the claim took off with a vengeance.

Things escalated on Thursday when the Associated Press posted, then deleted, an article fact-checking the allegation. The piece was headlined: "No, JD Vance Did Not Have Sex With a Couch." A spokesperson for the AP told Semafor that the story had been retracted because it hadn't gone through the standard editing process at the wire service, and that the Associated Press was investigating how it made it to publication.

While the couch-sex debacle is silly, it's not helping Vance recover from a series of early campaign stumbles. Earlier this week, the senator was widely mocked for awkwardly joking that Democrats will accuse anything of being racist. "I had a diet Mountain Dew yesterday and one today and I'm sure they're going to call that racist, too," he said at a rally on Monday.

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The cringey attempt at humor has also found its way into couch-related content:

Vance was also widely criticized after a 2021 interview with Tucker Carlson in which he attacked Kamala Harris as a "miserable cat lady" whose lack of biological children made her unfit to serve in elected office. Vance's past comments about abortion and Trump have also been widely circulated.

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The comments about Harris, in particular, were met with widespread backlash by voters, commentators, and social media users who not only pointed out that Harris has two stepchildren but that attacking childless Americans — whatever their reasons for not reproducing — as inferior was a perilous message for a party already struggling to with the issue of reproductive rights and freedoms.

Again, we don't know if Vance actually enjoys pushin' the cushions, but if his concern is that the country needs to produce more children, that's definitely not how they're made.

****

Juan Matute

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpLpOtFNFWg

(New link as of 17 July)

- click on it)
― The Lincoln Project

As usual, my go-to column to pass on is HCR. Reading is now is truly a time for a giddiness and pleasure that was absent too much of the time since mid-2015. The light is bright at the end of the tunnel. Hopefully this sense and spirit builds through the election. What drives my enthusiasm is that we may finally put Donald J. Trump and the corrosive MAGA deep into the bowels of the canyons of the sanitation dumps of history. I do believe in a two-party system (or more), and maybe the Republican Party can pick up from where folks like Gingrich, Tom Delay, Grover Nordquist and Karl Rove drove the party into the sinister ditch and poisoned the system. Yes, a new day is on the horizon. Just watch out where you sit on the couch.

Heather Cox Richardson from Letters from an American heathercoxrichardson@substack.com
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Jul 25, 2024, 10:40 PM (9 hours ago)

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July 25, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JUL 26

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Momentum continues to build behind Vice President Kamala Harris to become the Democratic Party's presidential nominee, and the national narrative as a whole has shifted.

Democrats appear to be generating significant enthusiasm among younger Americans. Yesterday, for the first time in their history, the March for Our Lives organization endorsed a presidential candidate: Kamala Harris. Students from the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, organized March for Our Lives after the shooting there in 2018. Executive director Natalie Fall said that the organization "will work to mobilize young people across the country to support Vice President Harris and other down-ballot candidates, with a particular focus on the states and races where we can make up the margin of victory—in Arizona, New York, Michigan, and Florida."

Andrea Hailey of Vote.org announced that in the 48 hours after President Biden said he would not accept the Democratic nomination, nearly 40,000 people registered to vote. That meant a daily increase in new registrations of almost 700%.

People are turning out for Harris in impressive numbers. In the hours after she launched her campaign, Win With Black Women rallied 44,000 Black women on Zoom and raised $1.6 million. On Monday, around 20,000 Black men rallied to raise $1.2 million. Tonight, challenged to "answer the call," 164,000 white women joined an event that "broke Zoom" and raised more than $2 million and tens of thousands of new volunteers.

Another significant endorsement for Harris came yesterday from Geoff Duncan, the Republican former lieutenant governor of Georgia, who wrote on social media: "I'm committed to beating Donald Trump. The only vehicle left for me to do that with is the Democratic Party. If that requires me to vote for, speak for, or endorse [Kamala Harris] then count me in!" Duncan's public announcement offers permission for other Georgia Republicans to make a similar shift. In 1964, South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond similarly paved the way for southern Democrats to vote for Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater.

Harris's appearances are generating such enthusiasm from audiences that when she delivered the keynote address this morning at the convention of the American Federation of Teachers in Houston, Texas, the applause delayed her ability to begin. After a speech defending education and calling out the cuts to it in Project 2025, Harris ended by demonstrating that after decades of Democrats being accused of being anti-American, Trump's denigration of the country has enabled the party to claim the position of being America's defenders.

"When we vote, we make our voices heard," Harris said. "So today, I ask you, AFT, are you ready to make your voices heard? Do we believe in freedom? Do we believe in opportunity? Do we believe in the promise of America? And are we ready to fight for it? And when we fight, we win! God bless you and God bless the United States of America."

Today the Commerce Department reported that economic growth in the second quarter was higher than expected, coming in at 2.8%, thanks to higher spending driven by higher wages. The country's changing momentum is showing in media stories hyping the booming economy Biden's team tried for years to get traction on. "Full Employment is Joe Biden's True Legacy" was the title of a story by Zachary Carter that appeared yesterday in Slate; CNN responded to today's good economic news with an article by Bryan Mena titled: "The US economy is pulling off something historic."

With Harris appearing to have sewn up the nomination, the question has turned to her vice presidential pick. That question is fueling the sense of excitement as potential choices are in front of cameras and on social media advocating Democratic positions and defending the United States from Trump's denigration. Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro listed the economic gains of the past years, and said: "Trump, you've got to stop sh*t talking America. We've got to start standing tall and being patriotic and showing how much we love this amazing nation."

The vice presidential hopefuls appear to be having some fun with showcasing their personalities, as Minnesota governor Tim Walz did in his video from the Minnesota State Fair where he and his daughter went on an extreme ride. So are social media users who have dug up old videos of, for example, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg explaining how he would pilot a small starfighter that had lost its auxiliary shields, or Arizona senator Mark Kelly's identical twin brother Scott pranking a fellow astronaut on the Space Station with a gorilla suit Mark smuggled on board.

That sense of fun is an enormous relief after years of political weight, and it has spilled over into making fun of the Republican ticket, most notably with a false story that vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance wrote about—and I cannot believe I am typing this—having sex with a couch. The story is stupid, but worse are the denials of it, which have spread the story into populations that otherwise would likely not have seen it.

Just two weeks ago, Vance appeared to be the leader of the next generation of extremist MAGA Republicans, but now that calculation seems to have been hasty. Vance is a staunch opponent of abortion—the key issue in 2024—and he has been vocal in his disdain of women who have not given birth, saying in 2021, for example, that the U.S. was being run by "a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too." He went on to say that people who don't have children "don't really have a direct stake" in the country.

Republican commentator Meghan McCain noted that Vance's "comments are activating women across all sides, including my most conservative Trump supporting friends. These comments have caused real pain and are just innately unchristian." Actor Jennifer Aniston, who tends to stay out of politics, posted: "I truly can't believe this is coming from a potential VP of The United States." Vance had called out Harris by name in those 2021 comments, and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff's ex-wife Kerstin Emhoff took to social media to defend Harris from Vance's attacks on her as "childless," calling her "a co-parent with Doug and I. She is loving, nurturing, fiercely protective and always present. I love our blended family and am grateful to have her in it." Harris's stepdaughter chimed in: "I love my three parents."

Vance also ties the Republican ticket firmly to Project 2025. The Trump camp has worked to distance itself from Project 2025—not convincingly, since the two are obviously closely tied, but it turns out that Vance wrote the introduction for a forthcoming book by Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, who was the lead author of Project 2025. The book appears to popularize that plan, right down to its endorsement of a "Second American Revolution," and according to the book deal report, proceeds from the book will go to the Heritage Foundation "and aligned nonprofits."

Now Vance's words praising Project 2025 will be in print, just in time for the election. Yesterday, Trump posted: "I have nothing to do with, and know nothing about, Project 25 [sic]. The fact that I do is merely disinformation put out by the Radical Left Democrat Thugs. Do not believe them!"

Trump is clearly aware of, and concerned about, the changing narrative. This morning, he called in to Fox & Friends, saying, "We don't need the votes. I have so many votes. I'm in Florida now…and every house has a Trump-Vance sign on it. Every single house…. It's amazing the spirit…. This election has more spirit than I've ever seen ever before." Tonight the Trump campaign proved their worry by backing out of debates with Harris, saying debates can't be scheduled until she is the official nominee, although Biden was not the official nominee when they met in June.

The larger narrative shift has affected the media approach to Trump, who is accustomed to shaping perceptions as he wishes. Now, 12 days after the mass shooting at his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, there is increasing media attention to the fact that there has still been no medical report on Trump's injuries, although he wore a large bandage on his ear at the Republican National Convention and said at a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on Saturday that he "took a bullet for democracy."

Yesterday, FBI director Christopher Wray told Congress that it is not clear whether Trump was "grazed" by a bullet or by shrapnel, words that former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance called "FBI speak for, 'it's unlikely it was a bullet.'"

CNN chief medical consultant Dr. Sanjay Gupta noted last week that the people need a real medical evaluation of Trump's injuries, explaining that "gunshot blasts near the head can cause injuries that aren't immediately noticeable, such as bleeding in or on the brain, damage to the inner ear or even psychological trauma." But, as Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo has noted, much of the press has kept mum about the story.

Media outlets have reported Wray's testimony, though, and in a social media post today, Trump called on Wray, whom he appointed to head the FBI, to resign from his post for "LYING TO CONGRESS." Tonight, he reiterated that "it was…a bullet that hit my ear, and hit it hard."

Perhaps eager to get back to their districts, House Republicans canceled their expected votes on appropriations bills scheduled for next week and left town today for their August recess. The House will not reconvene until early September. The government's fiscal year 2025 begins on October 1.

—

Notes:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/24/opinion/trump-lies-charts-data.html

https://marchforourlives.org/in-a-first-ever-endorsement-march-for-our-lives-endorses-kamala-harris-for-president/

https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/us-economic-growth-regains-steam-second-quarter-inflation-slows-2024-07-25/

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/07/biden-economy-employment-inflation.html

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/25/entertainment/jennifer-aniston-jd-vance/index.html

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/25/economy/us-economy-gdp-second-quarter/index.html

https://www.mediamatters.org/heritage-foundation/jd-vance-wrote-foreword-book-project-2025-architect-kevin-roberts-and-proceeds

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-might-not-shot-1930037

https://people.com/was-trump-struck-by-bullet-or-shrapnel-fbi-director-testifies-8683340

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trump-wants-fbi-director-resign-immediately-chris-wray-rcna163641