Tim Walz Demonstrates Versatility, Critiquing Trump and Making JD Vance Couch Joke | Vanity Fair

Hours after being officially announced as Kamala Harris’s 2024 running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz took to the stage in Philadelphia to introduce himself to the country. And, as part of that introduction, he proved he can walk and chew gum at the same time, or, in this case: make the case for electing Harris, warn people about Donald Trump’s terrifying plans for a second term, bring the Big Dad Energy, and make a JD Vance couch-fucking joke.

Going after his VP competition, Walz told the crowd: “JD Vance literally wrote the foreword for the architect of the Project 2025 agenda. Like all regular people I grew up with in the heartland, JD studied at Yale, had his career funded by Silicon Valley billionaires, and then wrote a bestseller trashing that community. Come on! That’s not what Middle America is. And I gotta tell you, I can’t wait to debate the guy. That is, if he’s willing to get off the couch and show up.… You see what i did there?”

The business about the couch, of course, appears to be a reference to the joke that took the internet by storm last month, which began with a social media post that read: “Can’t say for sure but he might be the first vp pick to have admitted in a ny times bestseller to fucking an inside-out latex glove shoved between two couch cushions (vance, hillbilly elegy, pp. 179-181).” That post led to, among other things, a since-removed Associated Press “fact-check” story headlined “No, JD Vance did not have sex with a couch” and to Last Week Tonight asking Vance’s team if the Ohio senator had ever had sex with a couch or “any other furniture or household items.” (The show did not receive a response.)

Couch jokes aside, Walz also used his time in Philadelphia to go after Trump and warn what giving the ex-president a second term would mean. “Donald Trump sees the world a little differently than us,” he told the crowd. “First of all, he doesn’t know the first thing about service. He doesn’t have time for it because he is too busy serving himself. Again and again and again, Trump weakened our economy to strengthen his own hand. He mocks our laws. He sows chaos and division. And that’s to say nothing of his record as president. He froze in the face of the COVID crisis. You drove our economy to the ground. And make no mistake, violent crime was up under Donald Trump. That’s not even counting the crimes he committed!”

Walz added: “If Trump gets the chance to return, he’s going to pick up exactly where he left off five years ago. Only this time it will be much, much worse. Raising costs on middle-class family. He will repeal the affordable care act. No doubt about it. He will gut Social Security and Medicare. And when somebody tells you who they are, believe them. He said he will ban abortion throughout this country and he will do it. Donald Trump is not fighting for you or your family. He never sat at the kitchen table like the one I grew up at, wondered how we were going to pay the bills. He sat at his country club in Mar-a-Lago wondered how he could cut taxes for his rich friends.”

Naturally, the governor also used his time to talk up Harris, praising her for spending her career fighting “on the side of the American people,” and saying that her “idea of freedom is [for] education to be the ticket to the middle class, not crippling debt. Air that is clean. Water that is pure. Communities that are safe. A place where we settle our political differences, not through violence, but with our votes. And that is what this election is about.”