It is ironic — and fitting — that the Republicans have become victims of fake news. It was Donald Trump in 2016 who started it. No amount of fact-checking would stop him from making up things about Hillary Clinton.
Eight years later, his VP pick, JD Vance, is suffering from an insurmountable fake news attack. It started as “sarcasm” by a random tweet. An “X” user claimed that Vance’s memoir had a scene describing his penchant for being intimate with couches.
As the Tweet went viral, it painted Vance as the last person you could take seriously. Photos of couches became stand-ins for Vance. His old utterances against “childless mothers” didn’t help but the couch story was much more damaging. What kind of a guy would do that?
The venerable Associated Press did a shoddy job of fact-checking it. They first said it was fake news and then withdrew their article. The confusion led your writer to buy a Kindle version of the book to check. No, Mr Vance hasn’t been what has been suggested.
It is by now clear that it is fake news, or is it? In the Trumpian way, it doesn’t really matter. Kamala Harris’ VP pick, Tim Walz, said in a Pennsylvania rally he couldn’t wait to debate Vance, “that is, if he’s willing to get off the couch and show up… you see what I did there.”
The couch fake news has gone so mainstream that Vance’s opponent is using it against him.
If you were facing a fake news image attack like this one, what would you do? Apart from feeling wronged.
Often, responding to an attack only makes it grow bigger. It becomes your word versus your opponent’s word. The media and the public love nothing more than a wrestling match in the ring. Voters believe what they want to believe.
When you become a joke
With the couch story, Vance is facing a particular kind of attack. One that makes him a butt of jokes, an object of ridicule. This is not calling him corrupt, incompetent or treasonous. This is worse: it’s making him look silly. With this image, nothing he says will be taken seriously, even if he is saying all the right things.
Here are some examples of how to recover from a laughing stock image.
The obvious one is Kamala Harris. Her cackling, her coconut tree line, her attempt to sound profound when she had nothing to say… there were just too many memes and too many viral videos to think she could overcome this image. It would have seemed like a bad idea to declare her as Presidential nominee.
Yet, as soon as she was declared the nominee, her campaign owned the jokes (with some help from pop musician Charlie XCX who labelled her as “brat”).
This is a trick that works for many: own the jokes on you, show the ability to laugh at yourself, and the jokes go away.
“You may call me Pappu”
Many years ago, Indian politician Arvind Kejriwal became a joke for wearing a thick muffler around his face, covering his head and ears, like many Indians do in the biting, dry North Indian winter.
It looks rather uncool and clownish. He came to be called Muffler Man. Kejriwal and his party immediately embraced the term, while he stopped wearing the muffler. Soon the attack went away.
No Indian politician has been ridiculed like Rahul Gandhi. He was called “Pappu” to project him as dumb and incompetent. “Pappu” jokes became a sub-genre by themselves. Today Rahul Gandhi is no longer called Pappu, having replaced his old image with that of an anti-establishment rebel.
The turning point was a famous speech in Parliament in 2018, during which he went and hugged PM Modi. In that speech he owned the word Pappu. “You may call me Pappu,” he said, “but I don’t hate you.” These words, in my view, were a turning point for Rahul Gandhi to be able to shed the “Pappu” image that had plagued him for years.
The moral of the story: Vance would do well to address the couch in the room.
