Democrats continue to joke about false JD Vance rumor after years of criticizing Trump for spreading misinformation

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