This week’s Lid Radio Show guest was Victoria Coates, Special Assistant to the President, Senior Director for International Negotiations, and member of the National Security Council for the Trump Administration.
Coates joined the Trump administration earlier this year after working for three years as a foreign policy adviser to Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX). Prior to that, she was an adviser to former Texas governor Rick Perry during his 2012 presidential campaign.
Victoria Coates has an incredible background story, she received her Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Pennsylvania in 1998. While teaching at UPenn she began to blog under the pseudonym “AcademicElephant” for RedState, where her writing covered mostly defense, foreign policy, national security. Aides to Donald Rumsfeld would sometimes slip one of her columns in his folder
