After years of condemning former President Donald Trump for spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories, Democrats are now mocking their running mate using a false and vulgar rumor.
The rumor, first posted on
The lie spread like wildfire, spawning jokes and memes, even as the original joker clarified that it wasn’t real and later made his account private. Several media outlets published fact checks of the claim.
Fervor peaked in Philadelphia on the day Vice President Kamala Harris named Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate. Walz said to an arena packed with thousands of enthusiastic supporters, “I have 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 cheered and Harris smirked behind him, Walz, who just weeks earlier started a trend of calling Republicans “weirdos,” quipped, “Did you see what I did there?”
The Harris campaign’s TikTok account, called Kamala HQ, posted a video of the moment that has been viewed more than 5.3 million times.
Republicans online were quick to criticize Walz for referring to the false story.
Jonathan Turley, a conservative legal academic, attacked “the couch story” in X as having been “repeatedly unmasked.”
“We are not even in the post-convention period and our main candidates are already ‘in the mud’ with trolls”, he wrote.
The content and rapid spread of false rumors seem made for the age of social media, when information that is real, false and sometimes a mixture of both is presented and disseminated in similar ways – and when fact-checks often they never have the same reach as bad information.
The incident has also caused rival political camps to argue over which misinformation is worse than others and the fine line between what is harmful and just mockery.
Walz wasn’t the first to joke about the viral hoax. 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 ridiculing “women cats.”
The post was captioned “JD Vance doesn’t express his hatred for women.”
On July 26, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee sent out a statement Press release blowing up Vance. The opening sentence read: “House Republicans are couching their public praise for Donald Trump’s vice presidential nominee with private criticism.”
Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, who at the time was considered on the shortlist to be Harris’ running mate, was involved in the joke twice in the following days.
Node July 28 episode of ABC News’ “This Week” Pritzker condemned Trump, saying, “He talks about all kinds of crazy things,” before adding, “You know, his running mate, as you’ve probably heard, is becoming known for his obsession with couches.”
At the July 29 “White Dudes for Harris” Zoom fundraiser, Pritzker told attendees, “I’ll keep this short. I know we have a lot of speakers. And then, of course, there’s another Zoom that I invite you all to called ‘Sofas Against Trump’.”
After Walz’s speech, some Democrats continued to embrace the joke.
Rep. Jared Moskowitz, D-Florida, cited a tweet from Vance criticizing Harris for not responding to media questions, with Moskowitz telling him, “I was on Air Force 2 JD, there’s 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 couch, because we’re coming after you.”
Asked for a statement on Titus’ comments, a spokesperson said, “I think we’ll go with what’s on the tape.”
As the jokes became popular, Republicans criticized 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 past harmful 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 heard that Joe Biden was an international genius supercriminal from Despicable Me 3. You will hear the story from the couch,” 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 story originally appeared on NBCNews.com read the full story
