President Donald Trump’s top official overseeing disaster response insists he was once teleported to a Georgia Waffle House.
Gregg Phillips, appointed in December to head the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) Office of Response and Recovery, made the claim during a January 2025 episode of the podcast Onward, CNN reported on Friday in a deep-dive profile of the top official.
“Teleporting is no fun,” Phillips said on the podcast, co-hosted by conservative activist Catherine Engelbrecht. “It was real.”
Phillips, a longtime conservative activist who repeatedly shared conspiracy theories on social media before being appointed to a top FEMA position, described an incident in which he said he teleported miles across Georgia.
“I was with my boys one time, and I was telling them I was gonna go to Waffle House and get Waffle House,” he said. “And I ended up at a Waffle House – this was in Georgia, and I end up at a Waffle House like 50 miles away from where I was.”
Phillips went on, “And they said, ‘where are you?’ and I said, ‘A Waffle House.’ And ‘a Waffle House where?’ And I said, ‘Waffle House in Rome, Georgia.’ And they said, ‘That’s not possible, you just left here a moment ago.’ But it was possible. It was real.”
The FEMA official described the experience as frightening.
“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. And you know it’s happening but you can’t do anything about it, and so you just go, you just go with the ride. And wow, what just an incredible adventure it all was.”
Phillips described another incident while he was driving in which he was “lifted up” and teleported some 40 miles from Albany, Georgia, before being set down in a ditch near a church. He said he had teleported more than once, and that the experiences left him questioning whether they were “evil” or “good.”
According to reporting by The Washington Post in December, Phillips had no formal background in disaster relief, despite claiming in a LinkedIn post that his on-the-ground disaster and emergency work “goes back four decades, all over the globe but focused in America.”
Phillips made headlines in 2017 after promoting the false claim that 3 million illegal votes were cast in the 2016 election. He later appeared in the widely discredited documentary 2,000 Mules, which advanced unfounded allegations of widespread voter fraud.
One FEMA staffer, speaking to The Post, warned that placing individuals without relevant expertise in leadership roles could have serious consequences. “There is no genuine effort to make sure that we can help people in their time of need,” the staffer said, adding that Americans “will lose their lives.”
The Daily Beast has contacted FEMA for comment.
