Victoria Coates

Dr. Victoria Coates is a cultural historian who received her Ph.D. from The University of Pennsylvania specializing in Italian renaissance studies. Her work has appeared in The Sixteenth-Century Journal, Gazette des Beaux-Arts and Renaissance Studies. Coates graduated from Trinity College in 1990 and completed her M.A. in art history at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. She went on to earn her Ph.D. in art history from the University of Pennsylvania in 1998. According to National Review, Coates began blogging anonymously for RedState in the mid-2000s; her writing on foreign policy, national security, and art history was noticed by staffers in Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's office and was eventually noticed by Rumsfeld as well. From 2007 to 2011, Coates was a senior research associate at the Rumsfeld Foundation In 2007, Dr. Coates became the Director of Research in the Office of Donald Rumsfeld and provided editorial support and content analysis for Mr. Rumsfeld's New York Times best-selling memoir Known and Unknown. In 2011, Dr. Coates joined the Rick Perry presidential campaign As of August 2017, she was part of President Donald Trump's diplomatic envoy to the Middle East, a team led by Jason Greenblatt. From January to June 2017, she was the senior director for strategic assessments on the National Security Council in the Trump administration. Coates was the national security advisor for Ted Cruz's 2016 presidential campaign and a national policy advisor for Cruz in the U.S. Senate. She also served as a consulting curator at the Cleveland Museum of Art.