Brain worms, adult nappies, and making sweet, sweet love to a couch

A recap on the American election so far

You know, when I was reading about presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy having a literal worm in his brain, I thought the American election cycle had reached its peak. 

I didn’t believe it at first. RFK – who is John F Kennedy’s nephew – is a self-described conspiracy theorist with some decidedly bizarre political views. Hearing that a worm had eaten part of his brain was just too convenient. A joke that wrote itself. 

But it was true. The independent candidate told the New York Times the condition had been discovered in 2010 after he complained to doctors about memory loss and fogginess. They ordered brain scans which revealed a worrying dark spot – a tumor they thought. The reality was arguably much worse. 

As RFK describes it, at some point a parasite (likely a tapeworm) had found its way into his skull, spent some time eating through his brain, and then died. 

I may not be from one of the world’s most famous political dynasties, but this strikes me as the kind of story you don’t want the voting public to know. Maybe it was the worm, but RFK thought it was fine. In fact, he promised to eat five more of the parasites and still win a debate against Joe Biden and Donald Trump.  

Who’d have thought a presidential candidate’s taunting promise to eat (more) brain worms wasn’t the election cycle’s pinnacle. It was just May. We’d barely made basecamp.

Around the same time as RFK and his story were doing the rounds, somewhat-credible reports that Donald Trump suffers from faecal incontinence made their way to the press. A former crew member from The Apprentice had broken his NDA to say production had been frequently interrupted by Trump’s need to change his adult nappy. Trump, in the manner of many dictators, wants to be seen as physically exceptional. Flawless, even. The story about his alleged nappy-wearing was obviously intended to undermine and humiliate the Republican candidate. 

Trump’s supporters responded by humiliating themselves. Grown men and women turned up to rallies proudly wearing nappies over their clothes and brandishing signs which said: ‘real men wear diapers’. I hate to admit that this could be a masterstroke. Would you engage with someone who seemed willing to shit themselves in public? Attack their position? Ask for moderation? At best you’ll be talking to someone proudly wearing an adult nappy. At worst they’d make good on their implied threat. 

The election campaign marched on. Trump presumably continued to shit his pants, the Democrats responded by shitting the bed. 

In the televised debate against Donald Trump, Joe Biden had a woeful performance. He was America’s oldest president – and he certainly looked it. A confused Biden stumbled through the entire excruciating program. But it’s a presidential race, not a presidential sprint – he had time to get back on message and recover. Instead Biden referred to Kamala Harris as ‘Vice President Trump’, and introduced Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as ‘President Putin’. 

Just when it couldn’t look any worse for Biden, Trump had the incredible good fortune to almost be assassinated.

If Trump does wear a nappy, he surely made good use of it when that bullet clipped his ear. A terrifying moment, yes. But worth it to become a martyr without the inconvenience of actually being martyred. He pumped his fist in the air, shouted ‘fight’. Trump supporters lapped it up. The small padded bandage covering his damaged ear became a must-have accessory for the nappy-wearing crowd.

Biden, meanwhile, had two perfectly healthy ears. He couldn’t compete. Finally, much too late, he stepped down. For months the media has been preoccupied with whether or not Biden would make it to the election. That question had been answered. What next? Their attention turned to Trump’s running mate J.D Vance. Is it true, they asked, that he fucked a couch? 

No, really. 

Before J.D Vance was a divisive, hard-right Republican, he was best known for his rags-to-riches memoir The Hillbilly Elegy. We can trace the couch-fucking rumour to a tweet about this book. 

User @wunderbra666 wrote:

“On pages 179-81 Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance talks about fucking an inside out latex glove between two couch cushions. I’m so glad that this is coming from the guy who claims he’s all about family values.”

So we’re clear, there is no couch fucking in The Hillbilly Elegy. You’d expect that something so easy to fact check would be immediately ignored. But it wasn’t. It got momentum. And when people inevitable rebutted the couch-fucking rumour by, you know, reading those pages, the internet became more wily. 

They claimed that the couch fucking was only found in the first run of the hard copy edition. It was removed from all subsequent prints by a more savvy editor. This tweet then did the rounds. 

Suddenly an absurd Tweet becomes more plausible. Without a first-run, first-edition book in your hands it’s impossible to completely disprove. Also, people want it to be true. Even the Republican cheer squad, Fox News, are making sly references to the story. 

J.D Vance is snookered. If he says ‘I didn’t fuck a couch’ (or any more polite variation) he’s lost the game. To address the story it to dignify it. But ignoring the rumour gives it weight. It makes him look, well, a bit like a couch fucker.      

I think that people once would have dismissed this whole affair out of hand. But we’re in a world where adults are performatively wearing nappies to political rallies and presidential candidates are threatening to eat brain worms. 

Frankly, at this point, I’m not sure I don’t have brain worms.