President Donald Trump’s top official overseeing disaster response has hit back at those who clowned his ridiculous claim that he was once teleported to a Waffle House in Georgia.
Gregg Phillips, head of FEMA’s Office of Response and Recovery, took to Truth Social to defend himself after CNN revealed he once told a podcast he was abruptly teleported, without witnesses, to a restaurant miles from where he was standing.
“Haters gonna hate,” Phillips posted on Wednesday.
In another post, the FEMA official, a noted conspiracy theorist, made religious references and likened those who didn’t believe his impossible claim to those who do not believe Jesus Christ rose from the dead.
“God will not be mocked,” he wrote in another post. “People can debate me. “Question me. Even ridicule what they don’t understand. But here’s a real question…What’s harder to believe? That God could move in a moment during a spiritual battle, or Jesus Christ rose from the dead and is coming again? I know what I’ve experienced.”
Phillips said in a January 2025 episode of the podcast Onward that he was once with his “boys” when he ended up at a Waffle House in Rome, Georgia, “like 50 miles away from where I was.”
“Teleporting is no fun,” he said on the podcast, co-hosted by conservative activist Catherine Engelbrecht. “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.”
He continued, “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.
The FEMA official said he had teleported more than once, and that the experiences left him questioning whether they were “evil” or “good.”
Phillips was appointed in December to head FEMA’s Office of Response and Recovery despite having no formal background in disaster relief, The Washington Post reported. He made headlines in 2017 for parroting the false claim that the 2016 presidential election was rigged.
The Daily Beast has contacted FEMA for comment.
