Victoria Coates

Coates was born and raised in Lancaster, Pennsylvania where her father started an investment firm.[5] She is a descendant of Andrew Gregg Curtin who served as Governor of Pennsylvania during the Civil War.[6]

After earning an undergraduate degree at Trinity College, Connecticut she obtained a master's degree in art history from Williams College and a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania, where she wrote a thesis on Camillo Massimo.[7] She later taught at the University as an occasional adjunct instructor.[6]

In the 2000s, she blogged mainly about foreign policy under the pen name "AcademicElephant" at the Conservative blog RedState.[6][8] Her blog posts were read by aides of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who later recruited Coates to work as an advisor for his book, Known and Unknown: A Memoir, published in 2011.[6][9]

Coates served as an advisor to former Texas governor Rick Perry during his 2012 presidential bid before she became an advisor to Ted Cruz in 2013 and his leading national security advisor during his 2016 presidential campaign.[6]

Her book David's Sling: A History of Democracy in Ten Works of Art was published early in 2016. The book covers ten European artists and their major works, including Michelangelo (David), Jacques-Louis David (The Death of Marat), and Picasso (Guernica).[10]

She lives in Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia with her husband and two children.[6] Coates married her husband while a student at Penn. George Coates is a wine dealer. Her children are Gardner and Gowen.[11]

Coates had been part of the White House since Trump took office in 2017, and became one of the President's longest-serving staffers. Her area of expertise, national security, made her a key player in the government's deliberations on Iran and the Middle East; as such, Robert C. O'Brien appointed her Deputy National Security Advisor for Middle East and North African Affairs a few weeks after taking office. In her role as deputy, she split her duties with fellow deputy Matthew Pottinger.[12] In February of 2020, it became known that Coates was leaving the White House to become a senior advisor at the Energy Department;[13] the transfer officially occurred a few days later.[14]

As an advisor to the Energy Secretary, Coates has been based in Saudi Arabia to ensure the Department had an added presence in the region, as Washington struggled to deal with the global oil price crash threatening US energy producers.[15] Her start date remained unknown due to the COVID-19 pandemic.[16]