President Donald Trump is appointing people with a wealth of experience to some key government posts—including Victoria Coates, who has a PhD in Italian Renaissance art and is now the National Security Council’s senior director for strategic assessments. According to the Hyperallergic website, Coates served as the national security adviser to Senator Ted Cruz and was a consulting curator at the Cleveland Museum of Art, but appears to have little experience in defence or the military. She will now help Trump’s team “craft an aggressive response to the rise of Islamic terrorism and its threat against the American homeland”, Cruz told the Free Beacon website. Coates certainly has strong views on cultural heritage. Writing for the Weekly Standard magazine in 2012, she said: “[President Bashar Assad’s] callous indifference to the destruction of Syria’s cultural sites is yet another crime to lay at the feet of the dictator—and a sad reminder that not all the casualties of war are human.” She remained in post as we went to press—something of a miracle in itself.