President Donald Trump has been put on the spot after an election conspiracy theorist he appointed to a top disaster response position started telling people he once teleported to a Waffle House.
“What does ‘teleport’ mean?” Trump queried when asked by CNN about Gregg Phillip’s claims to have once teleported inside a Georgia Waffle House.
“Was he kidding?” the president followed up. Phillips, he was told, was not kidding—either about the Waffle House incident, or his deceased girlfriend having once levitated his car above the road to save him from an imminent collision, or that time Satan spoke to him in Spain.
“I don’t know anything about teleporting… It just sounds a little strange,” Trump told the network. “I know nothing about teleporting or him, but I’ll find out about it right now.”
The president—himself no stranger to outlandish claims, like being “the father of IVF” or that he has done more for Black Americans than any other leader “with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln”—joins a growing chorus of officials in his own administration to have expressed both confusion and concern over Phillips’ comments.
The White House appointed Phillips, a conservative political activist who rose to prominence promoting Trump’s false claims of rigging in the 2020 election, in December to serve as head of the Office of Response and Recovery at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), part of the Department of Homeland Security.
He has no background in disaster relief and appears to have first made the teleportation claim during a January 2025 episode of the Onward podcast, almost exactly a year before the Trump administration appointed him.
“Teleporting is no fun,” he told fellow conservative activist Catherine Engelbrecht, who hosts the show. “It’s no fun because you don’t really know what you’re doing. You don’t really understand it, it’s scary, but yet, um… but so real.”
“You know it’s happening but you can’t do anything about it, and so you just go, you just go with the ride,” he went on to say. “And wow, what just an incredible adventure it all was.”
That appearance, according to dozens of recordings from other right-wing podcasts over the past five years, reviewed by CNN, is apparently just the tip of a very large and bizarre iceberg.
Phillips is understood to have further claimed that his experiences of sudden, apparently involuntarily paranormal phenomena have occurred with such frequency that friends joke he is “half in and out” of an altogether different plane of existence.
“I’m actually dead,” he apparently said on one episode of the Onward podcast. “But I’m here doing God’s stuff. And so we laugh about that a little bit.”
The disaster relief chief apparently says many of these otherworldly chapters of his life took place while he was suffering from bone cancer. He claims to have treated himself with a cocktail of fenbendazole and ivermectin, two drugs ordinarily used to remove parasitic worms from livestock.
On other occasions, he reportedly told podcasters he’d been driving a car he’d just won in a poker game when the spirit of a woman he used to date suddenly appeared, lifted the vehicle clean off the road, and saved him from crashing with an oncoming truck.
He also recounted losing consciousness in a hardware store to later wake up in a McDonalds carpark with a Big Mac in his lap and more than 15,000 steps racked up on his phone, as well as a purported encounter that saw the Devil persuade him to empty out his water supplies while hiking across Spain.
Philips has continued to insist on the veracity of his Waffle House story even in the face of mounting scrutiny and ridicule since a recording of the podcast appearance in which he first made the claim resurfaced earlier in March.
The White House, just days after CNN first reported on the clip, pulled Phillips from a scheduled hearing on Capitol Hill. Sources told the network the FEMA chief has also increasingly found himself “sidelined” from the agency’s operations.
Phillips himself is apparently furious about the backlash and believes senior officials at both FEMA and across Homeland Security are now conspiring against him, the network reports.
Senior agency staff, still reeling from what’s understood to have been chaos under former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and her adviser Corey Lewandowski, nevertheless admit that Phillips’ willingness to push back against managerial decisions has earned him a degree of respect among FEMA staff.
“Yes, it’s hard to trust the judgment of someone who said they teleported and then doubled down on it,” one senior official said. “But he seems to really care about people, which I really appreciate. And I think he cares about readiness for hurricane season.”
Another person at the agency added: “At some level I’m sure my colleagues and I are just numb to the absurdity of the string of leaders we’ve had in the last year.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House, FEMA and DHS for comment on this story.
