A clip of far-right provocateur Ann Coulter saying former President Donald Trump is "like a couch" has resurfaced, taking on new significance after a now-debunked rumor surfaced claiming his running mate, J.D. Vance, had been intimate with his couch.
Social media has been flooded with jokes and memes suggesting that Vance once engaged in a sexual act with couch cushions. The viral claim that Vance wrote about having sex with a couch in his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, is untrue.
On July 15, the day Vance was confirmed as Trump’s running mate, X user @rickrudescalves claimed that Vance might be the first vice-presidential pick to have admitted in a New York Times bestseller to "f***ing an inside-out latex glove shoved between two couch cushions (Vance, Hillbilly Elegy, pp. 179-181)." Vance never describes anything of the sort in his book.
Which makes it even funnier that Coulter once referred to Trump as a "couch" during a television appearance, further underscoring the way she's turned against him since he failed to fulfill his campaign promise to build a wall at the southern border, a promise she long championed.
She said:
“It seems perfectly apparent to me, and anybody else who observes this president, he’s impulsive. He says things off the top of his head. Like a couch—he bears the impression of the last person who sat on him.”
You can hear what she said in the video below.
While Coulter said this well before Vance joined the GOP ticket, people saw an opportunity to drop some more couch jokes.
Others felt Coulter's remarks said quite a lot about Trump, couches aside.
The couch drama has further undermined Vance, who has come under fire in recent days for his remarks about "childless cat ladies," his prior status as a "Never Trumper," and his political stances, which include completely curtailing reproductive freedoms.
Earlier this week, the New York City Department of Sanitation (DSNY) appeared to join in on the couch joke, tweeting a post that included an image of a stained couch and the following message:
"Have a couch you just...don't love anymore? Set it out the night before your TRASH ONLY (not recycling) collection day."
While we can not know for sure whether shading Vance was intentional, late-night television hosts certainly had every intention to mock Vance—and did so.
Last Week Tonight host John Oliver said that while the claim isn't in Vance's book, he thinks "the reason it spread so fast might be that A, nobody read that f**king book, and B, it was incredibly easy to believe.” He joked that he has "never seen someone with more couch-f**ker energy.”
Late Show host Stephen Colbert also weighed in, playing a doctored clip of former President Bill Clinton saying, “I did not have sexual relations with that ottoman.” Colbert joked Vance would never make love to a couch because of his religious conservative beliefs, saying Vance "knows it’s Adam and Eve, not Raymour & Flanigan."
Erika Lee
