Only the Trump Administration Could Employ a FEMA Official Who Claims He Can Teleport and See Ghosts

One of the more amusing things about having a strange, mercurial President who is readily accessed by reporters via cell phone is that occasionally, a journalist gets to bring Donald Trump news about the oddities of his own administration, and for the briefest of moments Trump finds himself wondering out loud what kind of crazies it is he hired to fill all these critical governmental roles. So it is with Associate FEMA Administrator Gregg Phillips, the third highest-ranking person at the Federal Emergency Management Agency and leader of its Office of Response and Recovery, who has in recent weeks made headlines following the resurfacing of all sorts of bizarre claims of supernatural experiences he has apparently endured. Most notably, Phillips claimed that he has in several instances “teleported,” once into a Georgia Waffle House 50 miles away, where I can only assume a freshly made All-Star Special was waiting for him.

This is a story that is amusingly fucked-up enough on its own, but it takes on another layer of high comedy when you read that a CNN reporter actually got Donald Trump on the phone recently, specifically to ask the President of the United States about why a senior FEMA official has been telling stories about teleportation (and about ghosts, and Satan, and so much else). To which Trump apparently responded, “What does teleport mean? Was he kidding?” When it was explained to the President that not only was Phillips not kidding, but that he has repeatedly doubled down on his claims and connected them to his Christian faith, Trump said the following: “I don’t know anything about teleporting. It just sounds a little strange, but I know nothing about teleporting or him, but I’ll find out about it right now.” Which leaves us free to imagine yet another patently hilarious conversation: Trump exiting the call and asking his nearest White House staff to find out what this whole teleportation business is about. It’s like something straight out of Veep.

So, what is Gregg Phillips talking about? Well, most of the outlandish stories he’s apparently told over the course of the last half decade have come in the context of third-tier right-wing podcasts. In the course of these interviews, Phillips has discussed his health battles with metastatic bone cancer, and like a true conspiracist (which he has been for decades, on any subject available to him) he’s claimed to have forgone conventional treatment such as chemotherapy and instead substituted such alternatives as “a self-directed regimen of ivermectin and fenbendazole, antiparasitic drugs commonly used to deworm animals.” Would you believe it that most of Phillips’ wildest supernatural encounters have in fact taken place while he was sick with cancer and self-medicating on non-prescribed medications? Probably just a coincidence.

Gregg Phillips, the high-ranking FEMA official who said he teleported to a Waffle House has a history of making supernatural claims we found in his podcasts: a dead girlfriend who lifted his car off the road to avoid a crash, Satan encountering him on a hike, etc.

www.cnn.com/2026/04/14/p…

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— Andy Kaczynski (@kfile.bsky.social) Apr 14, 2026 at 8:01 AM

The claims of teleportation or “transportation” by God into various locales took place on an episode of the “Onward” podcast hosted by Catherine Engelbrecht, who has appeared alongside Phillips in various pieces of conspiracy media alleging widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, such as Dinesh D’Souza’s 2000 Mules. That podcast episode has subsequently been taken down after media attention on Phillips’ claims of teleportation, but it apparently wasn’t even the goofiest thing the FEMA official said in the course of that conversation. In the same podcast episode, Phillips also claimed that his life was once saved by the ghost of a deceased girlfriend, who appeared inside his moving car and proceeded to lift the vehicle out of the way of an oncoming truck collision.

“The girl that I had dated came into the car with me, the girl that had died,” said Phillips on the podcast. “She said ‘You’re not going to survive this. So I’m going to take you away.’ And she lifted me and the car up and out of the way from a truck that had slid across the road and had come all the way across the road and was about to hit me.”

As it turns out, metaphysical entities and deities have quite a history of personally paying Phillips visits. He has described being spoken to directly by God about his cancer, and in one delusional speech in a Truth Social post that is frightening in its intensity, he describes Satan speaking to him during a hike in the wilderness, seemingly attempting to get him to kill himself. My favorite detail here is that he effectively says that Satan successfully tricked him into pouring out all of his remaining water, and CNN notes he was left “in distress until he was found by a passerby who sought help.” Or in Phillips’ own rambling words: “Satan lied to me. He convinced me to pour out my water bottle to reduce my pack weight. He almost got his demonic wish and watched me die.”

So yes, this is what we, in professional terms, would designate as “a crazy person.” Ironically, though, his own coworkers within FEMA actually described Phillips as perhaps the “most reasonable and trusted political appointee inside the agency” according to CNN, because despite his personal delusions, he was one of the few Trump appointees at the agency who had any apparent interest in responding to disasters, as one might recall is meant to be FEMA’s function. While DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and her boytoy/deputy Corey Lewandowski looked to slash budgets and drove widespread resignations and reductions in FEMA’s effectiveness, Phillips apparently was one of the only people left at the agency willing to push back and defend the work that FEMA is meant to carry out. This left FEMA staffers in the odd position of defending Phillips’ record in his post, while simultaneously acknowledging the lunatic-like things coming out of his mouth. An unnamed FEMA official reportedly summed it up like this: “It’s straight-up Kafkaesque. 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.”

In a meeting with FEMA staff, David Richardson said he was unaware the United States had a hurricane season. Two staff members said it was unclear if he was serious, but the agency said he was joking.

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— News 📰 (@some-news.bsky.social) Jun 2, 2025 at 11:45 PM

On that front, you can’t blame the poor folks at FEMA for taking whatever they can get. The agency has largely been coasting by on dumb luck during the second Trump administration, fortunate that the biggest of disasters such as a hurricane landfall simply haven’t yet presented themselves. It has had no fewer than three acting or “temporary” administrators already, with the first, Cameron Hamilton, fired after he dared to stand in front of Congress and say the following, unthinkable line: “I do not believe it is in the best interests of the American people to eliminate the Federal Emergency Management Agency.” Imagine that, the head of an agency, saying to Congress that his agency should continue to exist rather than being entirely shuttered by DOGE. Hamilton was subsequently replaced by not just one but two different FEMA administrators who had zero past experienced in disaster or emergency response, first in the form of David Richardson, who resigned after only six months and once said he was unaware that the U.S. had a “hurricane season,” and then current administrator Karen Evans. She has been responsible for keeping billions of dollars in grants and disaster aid from being distributed by FEMA, playing the political games of Trump, who has personally wielded the agency as a weapon, approving disaster declarations for red states while ignoring more expensive or deadly disasters in blue states.

It’s no surprise that the media, therefore, has had a fun time with the idea of a senior FEMA official who is so deep in the conspiracy quicksand that he believes God is sending him on metaphysical journeys through time and space to arrive at a Waffle House of all places. The New York Times even went out to the specific Waffle House in question to see if anyone there remembered the incident where a man teleported into their midst–something you would expect would probably have been a memorable day on the job. Shockingly, none of the Waffle House employees or patrons could recall having seen that happen.

Waffle House Employees Didn’t See
FEMA Official Who Says He Teleported to Georgia Location

One longtime server said that she’s “seen it all,” but she’s “never seen that,” referring to Gregg Phillips’ teleportation claim.

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— Jon Cooper (@joncooper-us.bsky.social) Apr 4, 2026 at 11:21 PM

What is sort of surprising is seeing the Trump administration even care enough to distance itself from such an individual. CNN reports that the White House contacted DHS and told them to “keep him out of public view” in reference to Phillips, while an unnamed White House official was quote as saying “Everyone’s thoughts were, ‘What the hell is this? This guy has got to go.'” Phillips has subsequently been sidelined from public appearances related to FEMA that he would normally have been involved in, and was apparently told to stop posting on Truth Social … which he has absolutely not done. He is described now being “increasingly agitated and suspicious,” which is surely the first time those words have been used to describe a guy who once claimed to have blacked out in a Lowe’s Home Improvement store and gone on a mystical vision quest.

You can really only laugh in response to the idea that the Trump administration cares one iota about reining in this sort of erratic, paranoid or conspiratorial behavior, given that this exact brand of lunacy is practically a prerequisite for being given a high-ranking job in the administration in the first place. Are we meant to believe that you can spread all the medical or electoral conspiracy theories you want, but that saying you were teleported is a bridge too far for this administration? All the way back in 2018, Marjorie Taylor Greene was serving in Congress and claiming that California wildfires were being caused by Jewish space lasers, and no one in the administration gave a shit at the time. Hell, it was recently revealed that RFK Jr. once said he had cut off a dead raccoon’s penis on the side of the road, “so he could examine it later,” and no one in the Trump administration even blinked at that admission. Teleportation, on the other hand, well that’s apparently something it’s just irresponsible to suggest.

Okay guys, if you say so. You’ve picked a hell of a time to be able to notice nonsense coming out of the mouth of one of your own officials. Perhaps you could continue noticing this level of delusion in the future?