After years of condemning former President Donald Trump for spreading disinformation and conspiracy theories, Democrats are now poking fun at his running mate using a false, vulgar rumor.
The rumor, first posted on X last month, involves a fake passage about a sex act and a couch supposedly in Sen. JD Vance’s 2016 book, “Hillbilly Elegy.”
The lie spread like wildfire, spawning jokes and memes even as the original joke’s author clarified that it wasn’t real and later made his account private. Several news outlets published fact-checks of the claim.
The fervor reached a peak in Philadelphia, the day Vice President Kamala Harris named Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate. Walz told an arena filled with thousands of excited supporters: “I got to tell you, I can’t wait to debate [Vance]. That is if — if he’s willing to get off the couch and show up.”
As the crowd roared and Harris smirked behind him, Walz, who just weeks earlier started a trend of calling Republicans “weird,” quipped, “You see what I did there?”
The Harris campaign’s TikTok account, named Kamala HQ, posted a video of the moment that has been viewed over 5.3 million times.
Republicans online were quick to chastise Walz for referring to the false story.
Jonathan Turley, a conservative legal scholar, attacked “the couch story” on X as having been “debunked repeatedly.”
“We are not even in the post-convention period and our leading candidates are already ‘in the mud rolling around’ with trolls,” he wrote.
The content and rapid spread of the false rumor seems made for the social media age, when information that is real, false and sometimes a blend of both is presented and disseminated in similar ways — and when fact-checks often never have the same reach as the bad information.
The incident has also caused rival political camps to argue over which pieces of false information are worse than others and the fuzzy line between what is harmful or just mockery.
Walz wasn’t the first to joke about the viral falsehood. On July 27, nearly two weeks after the original false tweet was posted and a week after it was hidden by the author, the Harris campaign account posted a screenshot on X of a 2021 tweet from Vance deriding “cat ladies.”
The post was captioned “JD Vance does not couch his hatred for women.”
On July 26, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee sent around a news release blasting Vance. The opening sentence read, “House Republicans are couching their public praise of Donald Trump’s vice presidential nominee with private criticism.”
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, who at the time was considered to be on the short list to be Harris’ running mate, leaned into the joke twice in the following days.
On the July 28 episode of ABC News’ “This Week,” Pritzker condemned Trump, saying, “He talks about all kinds of crazy stuff,” before adding, “You know, his running mate, as you probably have heard, is, you know, getting known for his obsession with couches.”
On the July 29 “White Dudes for Harris” Zoom fundraiser, Pritzker told attendees: “I’ll keep my remarks short. I know that we have a lot of speakers. And afterward, of course, there’s another Zoom that I invite you all to called ‘Couches Against Trump.'”
After Walz’s speech, some Democrats continued to embrace the joke.
Rep. Jared Moskowitz, D-Fla., quoted a tweet from Vance criticizing Harris for not taking questions from the media, with Moskowitz telling him: “I’ve been on Air Force 2 JD, there is a great couch on it.”
And at a rally in Las Vegas on Saturday, Rep. Dina Titus, who spoke before Walz and Harris, addressed Vance with the line, “You better hide behind that sofa, because we’re coming for you.”
Asked for a statement on Titus’ comments, a spokesperson said, “I think we’ll just go with what’s on the tape.”
As the quips have gone mainstream, Republicans have blasted Democrats for helping spread the lie — even as Trump and his allies continue to share falsehoods about Harris and Walz.
Democrats are defending their jokes as harmless fun, pointing to harmful past conspiracies spread by Trump and other Republicans about Democrats’ running secret sex trafficking rings, being pedophiles or changing their identities for political purposes as far worse than a meme about a couch.
“For 2 years we had to hear that Joe Biden was an international super criminal mastermind from Despicable Me 3. You will listen to couch story,” Moskowitz tweeted last week in response to Turley’s complaints.
Representatives for the Trump and Harris campaigns, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Pritzker and Moskowitz did not return requests for comment.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
