NYT Interviews Waffle House Regulars About Trump Official’s Teleportation Claim: ‘I’ve Been Drunk and Ended Up in a Waffle House’

The New York Times interviewed “roughly two dozen workers and regulars” at Waffle House locations in Rome, Georgia in an entertainingly thorough effort to investigate a truly unusual claim by a top FEMA official that he once teleported there.

Yes, teleported.

As in, the ability to instantly travel between two distant locations as seen in Star Trek and other popular science fiction — with fiction being the operative word here — stories.

If you haven’t heard the story, that’s a damning sign of how unhinged our current political climate is that such a bonkers tale got missed, but that’s a column for another day. In March, CNN’s KFile team of Andrew Kaczynski, Em Steck, and Gabe Cohen reported that Gregg Phillips, the head of FEMA’s Office of Response and Recovery, had a disturbing history of violent political rhetoric and claims of teleporting to a Waffle House.

The KFile report covered in detail Phillips’ past comments and social media posts that included angry, violent rhetoric about President Joe Biden and other Democrats, inflammatory comments about migrants, as well as this claim Phillips made on a podcast in January 2025 about his “incredible adventure” teleporting to a Waffle House:

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. 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…

Teleporting is no fun. 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 – but so real.

A few days after the KFile report, Phillips claimed many of his comments were “taken out of context,” but he doubled down on the claims about teleporting to a Waffle House.

Friday afternoon, The New York Times published the results of an in-depth investigation into Phillips’ claims. Kaczynski, who was on CNN’s Out Front Friday with guest anchor Brianna Keilar, shared the Times article with a tongue-in-cheek comment calling it “an important update.”

In the article, headlined “No One at Waffle House Remembers FEMA Official Who Says He Teleported In,” Times national correspondent Richard Fausset shares what he learned after tracking down all three Waffle Houses in Rome, Georgia and chatting with the denizens of the beloved waffle restaurants:

Indeed, among roughly two dozen workers and regulars interviewed this week at heRome’s tthehree Waffle House locations, none said they were aware of anyone traveling to the 24-hour restaurants by paranormal means, despite their reputation as powerful magnets for the sort of idiosyncratic characters who tend to surf the psychic fringes of the American South.

But no one at any of the three Waffle Houses recognized [Phillips’] picture.

Among the people Fausset interviewed were Shastoni Burge, a 38-year-old Waffle House server who had spent most of her decade there on the night shift. Burge said she had been “punched in the face by a customer,” “saw someone overdose in the bathroom,” and “[o]ne night, a man took all the steak knives and threatened the staff with them,” but she never saw anyone teleport in for some waffles.

“I’ve seen it all,” said Burge. “But I’ve never seen that.”

One customer who was “finishing up breakfast” when Fausset encountered her was skeptical of Phillips’ claim he teleported to a Waffle House “and noted that she, personally, had come to Rome in a 2018 Kia Niro,” the reporter wrote.

The Times also interviewed a physics professor:

In a phone interview on Thursday, Sidney Perkowitz, emeritus professor of physics at Emory University, said that pulling off the teleportation of an entire human being would be a neat trick. “The amount of information you need to reproduce something as complicated as a body is so immense that I don’t think there’s a number that can express it,” he said. “Expressing what you need about every atom, every electron, etc., is just off the charts as far as the data goes.”

The real hero of the story, however, is 29-year-old Austin Spears, a Waffle House customer with a tale familiar to many a hash-brown-loving regular.

“I can say I’ve been drunk and ended up in a Waffle House,” said Spears. “Don’t know how I got there. But I was there.”

The Times article also notes that Fausset “takes his hash browns scattered, smothered, covered and peppered.”

Watch the clip above via CNN.

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