Victoria Coates

Victoria Curtin Gardner Coates is an American art historian, blogger and political consultant. She served as Senior Advisor to Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette in 2020 and later was appointed to run the Middle East Broadcasting Networks. She served on the United States National Security Council, originally as the Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Strategic Assessments before getting promoted to Deputy National Security Advisor upon the nomination of Robert C. O'Brien. Early life and education Coates was born and raised in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where her father, Eugene Herr Gardner, started an investment firm. She is a distant descendant of Andrew Gregg Curtin, who served as Governor of Pennsylvania during the Civil War. She attended Lancaster Country Day School through 1986. After earning an undergraduate degree at Trinity College, Connecticut, she obtained a master's degree in art history from Williams College in 1992, and a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania, where she wrote a dissertation on Camillo Massimo. She later taught at the University as an occasional adjunct instructor. Political career In the 2000s, she blogged mainly about foreign policy under the pen name "AcademicElephant" at the conservative blog RedState. 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.