Top FEMA Official Swears God Is Teleporting Him to Waffle House

A Trump administration official continues to insist that he once teleported to a Waffle House, despite being mocked. 

As CNN reported in late March, Phillips has spoken on multiple podcasts about his teleportation activities, which include having gone to a church and to the breakfast restaurant chain. On one of the podcasts, Phillips, who serves as associate administrator for the Office of Response and Recovery at the Federal Emergency Management Association, said, “Teleporting is no fun. It was real.” But a follow-up CNN report reveals that Phillips has since doubled down, posting repeatedly on social media that the experience is real and connected to his religious beliefs. 

On Truth Social late last month, Phillips wrote, “I know what I’ve experienced, I know Who I serve.” Replying to another detractor, Phillips posted, “I have no regrets for my words nor my faith in my Savior, Jesus Christ. The Bible has many examples of the power of God.” In still another post, Phillips cited a passage from the New Testament’s Book of Acts where the Holy Spirit “snatched” away the apostle Philip after a baptism on a road between Jerusalem and Gaza, and Philip is then described as showing up in the city of Azotus, miles away. 

On a podcast in January 2025, Phillips said of the Waffle House experience, “I was with my boys one time, and I was telling them I was gonna go to Waffle House and get Waffle House. 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’s job at FEMA has a lot of responsibility, dealing with emergency aid, restoring infrastructure, search and rescue operations, and distributing disaster assistance amounting to billions of dollars. At least one high-ranking official at the agency has praised his efforts, calling him “FEMA’s best hope at this moment” when he was hired back in December. 

But Phillips’s past—aside from his teleportation fixation—is controversial. As a major proponent of the “Big Lie,” the conspiracy theory that Donald Trump only lost the 2020 election because it was rigged against him, he had a prominent role in Dinesh D’Souza’s election-denial flop film 2000 Mules. And in January 2025, he said on a podcast regarding President Biden, “I would like to punch that b*tch in the mouth right now. He is a nasty, shitty, crappy human being, and he deserves to die. And I hope he does.”  

Last week, Phillips was supposed to testify at a House Homeland Security Committee hearing, but after CNN’s initial report, he was taken off of the schedule. Democratic Representative Bennie Thompson said at the hearing that Phillips’s “violent rhetoric and wild conspiracy theories are troubling for someone who holds a leadership position at DHS.” 

Thompson was joined by Democratic Representative Tim Kennedy, who said Phillips was “wildly unfit for his role as head of FEMA response and recovery” because of “his violent statements about former President Biden” and “deeply troubling bigoted comments about immigrants.” 

“All of which, to me, makes him wholly disqualified to hold his position on its own—but only to be outdone by his claims of being teleported to a Waffle House,” Kennedy added.