A senior Trump administration tasked with managing America’s disaster response won’t stop talking about teleporting.
Gregg Phillips, who leads FEMA’s Office of Response and Recovery, first made claims about teleportation on a podcast, describing the feeling of his car being “lifted up” and relocated into a ditch near a church. In another instance, Phillips described finding himself teleported to a Waffle House miles away from his previous location.
The Trump administration named Phillips, best known for profiting from election conspiracy theories, to one of the top roles at the disaster relief agency in December. “Teleporting is no fun. … It was scary in a way,” Phillips said on an episode of the podcast Onward, which aired prior to his appointment to the federal government. At the time, Phillips said he didn’t know if the experience was “good” or “evil.”
After CNN reported on Phillips’s strange claims last month, the Federal Emergency Management Agency official has taken to social media to defend his experiences and contextualize them in religious terms. In a Truth Social post, Phillips said that God moved him instantaneously “during a spiritual battle.” Phillips likened his experience to miracles described in the Bible, including the resurrection of Jesus, celebrated on Easter.
“People can debate me. Question me. Even ridicule what they don’t understand,” Phillips wrote. In one Truth Social reply, Phillips accused the media of taking his quotes out of context, describing the experiences as a spiritual journey linked to his battle with cancer and attributing the teleportation to “the power of God.”
CNN previously reported the FEMA official’s account of being teleported: “I was with my boys one time, and I was telling them I was gonna go to Waffle House,” Phillips said in early 2025. “This was in Georgia, and I end up at a Waffle House like 50 miles away from where I was.”
“And they said, ‘Where are you?’ And I said, ‘A Waffle House.’ They asked, ‘A Waffle House where?’ And I said, ‘A 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.”
From conspiracy theories to FEMA
His claims about teleportation have raised eyebrows, including among Democrats in Congress. In March, Rep. Tim Kennedy of New York called Phillips “wildly unfit for his role as head of FEMA response and recovery,” with other representatives echoing the sentiment.
Teleportation aside, the Trump appointee is no stranger to controversy. Last year, Philips said that former President Joe Biden “deserves to die” and that he would “like to punch that bitch in the mouth right now.” In now-deleted posts surfaced by CNN, Phillips often attacked Democratic lawmakers, including one instance in which he called Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York a “fat-ass” and a “pig.”
His social media barbs aren’t the only things that have been scrubbed online. The podcast episode with some of Phillips’s unusual statements was deleted sometime after CNN first reported on the teleportation claims last month. That episode was hosted by his business partner and fellow election denier Catherine Engelbrecht, co-founder of True the Vote, a Texas-based organization that was sued by an election software company for defamation in the aftermath of the 2020 election.
After filing complaints with Georgia’s secretary of state over allegations of voter fraud and ballot stuffing in the state, the group eventually admitted that it had no evidence to back up its claims. In 2023, a complaint filed to the IRS accused the organization of running afoul of state and federal laws by using donations to personally enrich Engelbrecht as well as Phillips, who served as the organization’s longtime director.
In a Truth Social post on Wednesday, Phillips made an uncharacteristically polished statement on his prior claims about teleportation. “In 2023, I was given less than 12 months to live. … I was in the opening days of intensive treatment, heavily medicated, not thinking about future headlines,” Phillips wrote, before pivoting to religious terms.
“The word ‘teleportation’ was not mine. It was used by someone else in the conversation reaching for language to describe something with no easy name. The more accurate biblical terms are ‘translated’ or ‘transported,’” Phillips wrote.
Since March, his Truth Social bio has been updated to include a bible verse and the phrase “OPINIONS ARE MY OWN AND NOT THAT OF FEMA NOR DHS.”