by Steve Gimbel and Gwydion Suilebhan
Jokes about JD Vance’s romantic entanglements with living room furniture have been ubiquitous for about two weeks now. Professional comedians like Chelsea Handler and John Oliver have leaned into them. Friends on social media have traded quips about Vance’s “one nightstand” and his illegitimate “love seat.” Kamala Harris’ own PR team even joined in on the fun.
The parade of puns all stemmed from one satirical tweet that was never meant to be taken seriously or believed literally. The fact that Democrats nonetheless embraced the idea, couching their attacks on Vance in sofa jokes, signals a fascinating shift in psychology that merits a closer look.
When we say that something is true, we generally mean one of two different things. The first is that whatever claim we are making is factually accurate. “Kamala Harris attended Howard University” is true because she did, in fact, graduate from that institution.
The second is a bit more slippery. Think of the way in which a great work of fiction like Heart of Darkness or The Color Purple can express profound truths about the human condition. Novels aren’t factual, but what they reveal can still be true in a deep way. That’s what we call narrative truth, rather than factual truth.
19th-century philosopher William Whewell wrote that facts are like pearls, valuable in their own right, but that in order to make a necklace out of them, we need a string: a coherent story that connects all the facts together in order to give us a deeper understanding. The narrative that allows us to make sense of the world is as important as the facts it connects.
Democrats have long been obsessed with factuality, with the pearls. “Find the Falsehood” is practically an Olympic sport on the left. Steve Bannon knew this, and he encouraged Donald Trump to “flood the zone” by telling as many whoppers as he could, turning Democrats’ fact-checking obsession into something akin to the last level of Space Invaders, when there were so many alien ships you could barely shoot them all down.
The GOP, on the other hand, has built its entire platform out of “alternative facts” that are thoroughly derided by “the reality-based community.” In the last few days, Trump has tried to disallow live fact-checking during his interview at the National Association of Black Journalists’ annual convention, and he’s refusing to allow fact-checking during any future debate he might have with Kamala Harris. Republicans love narrative truth, accessorizing their campaign outfits with one faux pearl necklace after another.
Stephen Colbert coined the term “truthiness” to describe GOP claims that feel true, even if they aren’t. He was satirizing George W. Bush’s ability to spin narratives that would resonate, even if they don’t calculate. Later, at the 2006 White House Correspondents Dinner—speaking in the persona of the conservative character he played on The Colbert Report—he joked that “Reality has a well known liberal bias.”
Colbert’s satire delighted Democrats, whose commitment to reality led them to believe that finding the lies in GOP narratives would erode them. Sadly, once a narrative exists, it no longer needs facts for support.
Republicans have long understood this and have relied on it during Presidential campaigns. John Kerry, a war hero in Vietnam, was a formidable political opponent for George W. Bush in the 2004 Presidential election, but it didn’t matter. They “swiftboated” him with fake claims about his military service to construct a new narrative that undermined his perceived valor.
This week, speaking at the National Association of Black Journalists, Donald Trump made the outrageous claim that Vice President Harris only recently started to identify as a Black woman. His assertion has zero basis in fact, but Trump doesn’t care. He just wanted to tell a “truthy” story that would speak to the racist segments of his base.
Truthiness is lazy when it’s innocuous, but when it’s malignant, it’s poisonous to our discourse. Democrats have always despised it and, generally speaking, refused to use it… until this week.
The GOP platform has been built on a narrative of cartoonish, outsized misogyny. The overturning of Roe v. Wade, the attack on IVF, and the plans laid out in Project 2025 make it very clear that the party considers women less than fully human. Trump, the party’s current standard-bearer, was found in one court of law to have sexually assaulted E. Jean Carroll, while in another courtroom prosecutors presented evidence that he coerced an adult film star into an unwanted rendezvous just after his wife had given birth.
The addition of JD Vance to the Republican ticket only enhanced that same narrative. For starters, he used the pejorative term “crazy cat ladies” for women who decided to pursue a career instead of motherhood, suggesting not only that they have to be unhappy with their lives, but also that they ought to receive less of a vote than married mothers.
Enter the couch tweet. It was a modest indecent proposal, a claim that was simultaneously absurd, but somehow not so absurd. You could almost believe it was true, even if it wasn’t. (And to be clear, it wasn’t.) It felt like it might really be true.
By keeping the couch tweet alive, Democrats have begun to embrace truthiness for the first time. The furniture sex jokes we’ve been seeing might be built on falsehoods, but they’re still effective in reinforcing the narrative that the GOP ticket is weird—creepy weird, not cool weird, embodying the dangerous toxicity that women have to deal with in their everyday lives.
We say “That joke is funny because it’s true.” Like great books, jokes aren’t facts, but they contain verisimilitude. Memes of Vance claiming “I did not have sectional relations with that couch” are funny not because they’re factually accurate, but because they’re narratively true. They’re faux pearls tucked into a string of real ones.
This embrace of narrative truth over factual truth—a radical departure for Democrats, who love to quote Michelle Obama’s exhortation that “When they go low, we go high”—is a fascinating political development. They’re fighting differently this time, and it will be interesting to see whether the new strategy works and how it alters the rest of the campaign. If nothing else, perhaps we can look forward to a few more jokes.
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