JD Vance, a 40-year-old senator who transformed himself from a biting critic of Donald J Trump to one of his fiercest defenders, was elected the next vice president of the United States, becoming the third youngest and among the least experienced and most polarizing politicians ever to hold the office, The New York Times reports.

The country’s 50th vice president will be sworn in just two years after assuming his first public office as a senator from Ohio. Vance is unlike any other vice president before him in the modern era: none has started the job with such an extensive public record of condemning his or her boss.

He rose to national prominence with his 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” a best seller that liberal voters devoured to better understand Trump’s victory and the frustrations of the white working class that had put him in the White House.

Vance also seemed an ideal translator for Blue America as a Midwestern conservative who detested the new president, likening him in an essay to “cultural heroin.”