A presumably false story that went viral this week, with memes and jokes spreading rapidly across social media, about Donald Trump’s running mate J.D. Vance writing in his memoir about using a couch and latex glove during a solo sex act has found its way into the late-night monologues, with Steven Colbert riffing on the fake news on Thursday night.
The rumor about Vance made the rounds on X in recent days, including in this tweet by user @wunderbra666 on July 17, two days after Trump announced he’d picked Vance as his running mate: “On pages 179-81 Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance talks about fucking an inside out latex glove between two couch cushions. I’m so glad that this is coming from the guy who claims he’s all about family values.”
Hillbilly Elegy is Vance’s 2016 best-selling memoir about growing up in poverty and a broken home in rural Ohio and Kentucky.
“Of course, this isn’t our nation’s first furniture sex political scandal,” the host said during his Thursday monologue on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. “We all remember when Bill Clinton said this, [cuts to archive footage of Clinton speaking, the audio of which has been dubbed], ‘I did not have sexual relations with that ottoman.’”
‘Where does someone even get an idea like that? I blame those filthy IKEA instructions,” Colbert quipped.
Colbert structured the series of gags at Vance’s expense as a salute to the Associated Press, which published a fact-check article, headlined, “No, J.D. Vance did not have sex with a couch.”
Colbert then reports, citing an unnamed outside source, that a PDF search of Vance’s book yielded 10 references to couches. No sex act is mentioned in any of those passages in Vance’s book.
“Of course not,” the host jokes. “J.D. Vance is a very religious conservative. He knows it’s Adam and Eve, not Raymour and Flanagan.”
Seemingly serious, Colbert then gets into the misinformation of the whole situation — but also keeps repeating the fake news.
“This just shows how big a problem this information can be. Even a well-meaning fact check can wind up amplifying a false story,” he says. “So all of us, all of us, please, have a responsibility to stop the spread of vicious rumors like J.D. Vance had sex with a couch, because it’s simply not true, which is why we have to refuse to use the hashtag #cushinpushinJDVance.”
A strange twist in this story was mentioned before Colbert moved on from the series of Vance jokes: The AP has now removed the fact-check article in question from its website after it reportedly “didn’t go through the wire service’s standard editing process.”
