Trump on Top FEMA Official's Claims: 'Was He Kidding?'

A senior disaster chief who says he once supernaturally transported to a Waffle House 50 miles away is now somewhat on the shelf at FEMA. Gregg Phillips, the agency's No. 3 official, in charge of disaster response and recovery, has been quietly pulled back from public duties after CNN resurfaced years of his extraordinary claims, including that he literally teleported to a Georgia Waffle House. Phillips has also publicly described a dead girlfriend lifting his car out of danger, God sitting on his bed to discuss his cancer, and Satan urging him to dump out his last bottle of water on a hike in Spain. He has also said he rejected chemotherapy for metastatic bone cancer in favor of animal deworming drugs like ivermectin and fenbendazole.

The White House pressed the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees FEMA, to either remove Phillips or keep him out of sight after CNN's March report, a White House official told the outlet. President Trump, asked about Phillips on Thursday, responded, "What does teleport mean? Was he kidding?" and later called the account "a little strange," adding that he knew nothing about it, or about teleporting, but would "find out about it right now." Within days, Phillips was yanked from a planned Capitol Hill hearing, told to stop posting about teleportation on Truth Social, and left off a high-profile trip to hurricane-ravaged western North Carolina with new DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, despite Phillips' formal responsibility for disaster operations. "Wholly disqualified to hold his position," Democratic Rep. Timothy Kennedy said last month, per the AP.

Inside FEMA, the situation is adding to broader turmoil. Career officials say Phillips has clashed with Trump allies pushing deep staffing cuts and tighter political control of spending, arguing that the rollback could endanger preparedness. Some staffers, despite calling his stories "hard to trust," credit him as one of the few political appointees willing to defend the agency's mission in Trump's second term. "He seems to really care about people ... [and] cares about readiness for hurricane season," another senior official at the agency tells CNN. Meanwhile, the New York Times interviewed employees at three Waffle Houses in Rome, Georgia, where Phillips claimed he teleported to—and no one seems to remember any teleportation happening in their restaurants, or Phillips himself. (Phillips has popped up in headlines before.)