Cat conspiracies and couches: On JD Vance, regionalism and the Ohio grift

Scandal and self-deprecation are hardly taboo in the literary genre of the memoir. Be it Barack Obama snorting cocaine or Ozzy Osbourne snorting a line of ants, there is a casual and expected raunchiness to a best-selling autobiography. 

It’s in this spirit that a degree of legitimacy was granted to online claims this summer that JD Vance had sexual relations with a couch, the spread of which was only furthered by Tim Walz’s allusion to it at the Democratic National Convention. The alleged source, Vance’s best-selling 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy, mentions the word “couch” a total of 10 times in various contexts, but obviously none of these contexts involves making love.

This is the kind of story we’ve been conditioned to expect from our elected officials. We not only expect hypocrisy and flip-flopping in the theater of domestic politics – of which there has been little shortage this year – but also an abundance of grotesque works of the imagination. From Donald Trump’s accusation that Obama wasn’t born in the United States to his claims that Kamala Harris is a Marxist, there exists a growing intensity in politics. And the fervor is not exclusively imaginary. North Carolina’s Trump-backed Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, for example, was recently found to have been vulgarly active on a porn forums, while someone with access to a work email account belonging to Ohio senatorial candidate Bernie Moreno was found to have created a profile on an adult site that was soliciting casual sex with other men. 

Administrations with limited solutions to offer the public often turn toward conspiracies and sensationalized stories to distract from this fact. Vance’s tripling down on the conspiracy of Haitians eating cats is the new height of this trend, but it’s a part of a wider trend of Republican grifters who formerly opposed Trump but have now gone all in. 

The Ohio Grift

In 2016, Vance became liberal media’s commanding Trump-splainer. Media platforms ranging from CNN to Vox asked the author and venture capitalist to interpret the alleged “working class” support for Trump. But he wasn’t defending Trump in those years. In fact, Vance passionately opposed him. “While I think Trump had clearly diagnosed very real problems, I didn’t see any real evidence that he had much in the way of positive solutions,” he told the Cleveland Plain Dealer in 2016. He had no issue calling Trump an “idiot” and, at least in private, compared him to Hitler. 

Despite claiming that he’d wait a decade to run for office, Vance met with Trump in 2021 to talk about taking over the senate seat vacated by Rob Portman. Vance swiftly changed his views, deleting tweets, adopting an anti-immigrant position (despite his wife being the daughter of Indian immigrants) and repeatedly apologizing for his formerly anti-Trump stances. Since then, he’s become even more entrenched in the neo-fascist movements of today, most notably writing a blurb praising pizzagate conspirator Jack Posobiec’s unhinged new book, Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them).

Moreno, the car salesman turned Trump-backed opponent of Sherrod Brown, has followed a similar path. He went from calling Trump a “fake Republican” to arguing that any GOP candidates disloyal to Trump should be disqualified from running. A Colombian immigrant himself, Moreno’s tone has only become more radicalized after getting stiffed in 2022 when Trump asked him to drop out of the race that Vance eventually won. Despite having a gay son and his email being linked to an account that solicited casual sex with men online – which his lawyers claim was a prank by an intern – Moreno has since hopped on board with the conspiracy theories about the “radical trans agenda.” 

The Ohio grift is worthy of intense study in the fields of psychology and low-energy media spectacle, but it’s also a part of the wider battle for the reputation of the Midwest. 

Twisters and the Battle of Regionalisms

When the movie Twisters came out this summer, actor and star of the film Glen Powell told The Telegraph that “vast parts of America are underserved by Hollywood,” arguing that “New York and Los Angeles [are] making the decisions about what gets made, but there’s a whole lot more audience out there you need to think about.” Powell’s regionalism with Twisters is a cultural manifestation of a wider political battle over the reputation of the Midwest, the South and Appalachia, of which Vance, who claims to be both Appalachian and from Middletown, Ohio, is awkwardly at the center. 

“The representation of Appalachia as all white is not only inaccurate, but it preserves a false and destructive ideal of imaginary ‘pure white stock,’” wrote Meredith McCarroll in the Bitter Southerner. “To more fully understand a place – its real poverty alongside its potential for renovation, its history of fierce activism alongside the stories of extraction and abuse – requires a sort of patchwork panorama, made up of many angles and many points of view.”

The right-wing mythologies of the heartland are often at odds with the history of radical left-wing movements in these regions, none represented more clearly than the relative progressivism of Minnesota’s Walz. With a blue state legislature and Walz as governor, Minnesota was the first state to codify abortion rights after the Supreme Court overturned Roe; the state created a program to provide paid family and medical leave; and Walz signed a bill ensuring universal free breakfast and lunch for all K-12 students. 

It’s a natural extension of a party that’s called the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party – a coalition of left-wing forces that gained momentum in the 1930s then merged with the Democratic Party. This stands in complete contrast to red states such as Ohio, whose state legislature is the reverse image on every issue.

That Ohio’s conservative opportunists fell in line with Trump can hardly be seen as geographically unique – this was the path most Republicans in the GOP followed – but each region faces its own political conditions, and each region struggles with its own conflicts. 

There’s another curious marriage unfolding, one not solely in the regional arena between the left and right, but between the finance capital of Silicon Valley, coastal real estate investors such as Trump, and small business owners such as Moreno. Vance, who worked at venture capital firms in California and Washington D.C., is the middleman between the authoritarian aspirations of tech billionaire Peter Thiel and the radicalizing GOP. His pseudo-populist appeal to regionalism has so far served the reactionary facets of Silicon Valley more so than any labor union in the region, almost all of whom have endorsed Democratic candidates. 

Vance is one of those politicians whose fate and vigor are not righteous and exemplary, but malleable and mediocre, molded to the exact skin of Trump’s reactionary whims, exceeding them only in dullness and apathy. We are all familiar with the opportunism, hypocrisy, and conniving spirit of politics. But the Ohio Grift seems like something new, asking nothing of life except the approval of the cult of personality surrounding Donald Trump.