A funny thing happened on the way to the polls
WE MIGHT never hear JD Vance deny assaulting a couch now, and I don’t know if democracy will survive this. Last week (Aug 7), the Trump campaign was forced to acknowledge some baseless online tomfoolery which accused the Republican vice-presidential nominee of doing the horizontal tango with a couch. In a statement reported by the New York Post, the campaign said that it wasn’t going to discuss “couches or coconuts”.
This has been a big year for plant life and furniture, thanks to the strange amalgamation of high jinks and virality that only the Internet can produce. Today, voters will be hard-pressed to recite details of the conservatives’ sinister Project 2025, but will readily recall Vance’s unfortunate association with soft furnishing.
Such schoolyard taunts might lack subtlety, but their undertow of ridicule is a powerful force and woe betide you if you get caught in it. In 1971, the activist and political theorist Samuel Alinsky wrote: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counter-attack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.”
In fact, the couch-centric jeers that plague Vance might smack of Gen Z nonsense, but in refusing to deny them, the Trump campaign shows that it understands an ancient political playbook of underhanded behaviour.
Featuring prominently in this playbook is the apocryphal tale often told of the 36th US president Lyndon B Johnson, who reportedly spread a rumour about a political opponent having relations with a pig. Johnson’s aide had been rightfully aghast, saying, “Lyndon, you know he doesn’t do that!” To which Johnson replied, “I know. I just want to make him deny it.”
The anecdote might be fictional but the wisdom is sound, and we have proof. In 2021, the then Australian prime minister Scott Morrison was moved to deny an utterly bizarre rumour that he had soiled his pants at a McDonald’s in 1997, during a radio interview. The headlines of the resulting coverage predictably featured the denial, overshadowing the government’s main messaging about Covid-19 aid measures.
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What straight-laced politicians don’t understand is something teenagers instinctively grasp – by the time you have to deny an absurd accusation, you’ve already lost. You actually lost when something ridiculous was pinned on you, through an organic process that is devilishly difficult to reverse-engineer. It is an ineffable alchemy, best explained by Redditors who have opined that Vance simply looks like the sort of person who would assault a couch.
You’ll find the same alchemy in the “weird” label that has clung to the Trump-Vance loafer like an unwelcome strip of toilet paper. “Weird” succeeds where Hillary Clinton’s 2016 “basket of deplorables” remark failed, tapping into the same non-logic that makes teenagers so maddening.
I can imagine that the more sedate among us are unamused. Surely, voters ought to know better and be better. Serious matters are at stake here.
In that case, maybe politicians worldwide should’ve thought about that before they made a mockery of the democratic process – before they questioned the legitimacy of election results, lied to the public about the implications of Brexit, and spread lethal disinformation about Covid-19. If voters are now determined to keep yukking it up, it is only because they recognise politics for the farce it has long been. So, guess who’s laughing now?
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