Not the Strangest Thing

Placing a Waffle House visit in context.

No one teleported to a Waffle House. Though, as I write this on a Saturday morning before breakfast, the idea has many merits.

The Waffle House is on my mind because the New York Times went to Rome, Georgia this week to assess the claim of Gregg Phillips, a top FEMA official, that God had transported him there by supernatural means. None of the staff remembered him.

The Trump years have produced a lot of easily falsifiable claims, some more devastating than others. The crowd on the Mall in January 2017 was smaller than Trump said — a vanity lie, embarrassing, but not harmful. Alex Pretti, shot ten times by border patrol agents in Minneapolis after being tackled and disarmed, was called a domestic terrorist who tried to assassinate law enforcement though it was verifiably untrue. ¹

Phillips’s claim, that God moved him across Georgia to a 24-hour breakfast spot, might look like the farthest reach of this era — the strangest thing said by anyone with a federal badge. But that’s not quite the right way to understand this episode. Phillips doesn’t mark the outer limit. He points toward the fantasy that does.

Before we get there, it’s worth being precise about Phillips’s claim. It begins and ends with him. No one else has to lie. It didn’t mobilize a crowd, pressure an official, or overturn anything. The Waffle House staff didn’t remember him, and the story collapsed — falsified on contact with a single server who has seen a man threaten people with steak knives and still noticed nothing supernatural.

There is one layer of genuine consequence here: Phillips runs FEMA’s largest division, more than a thousand employees, nearly $300 million, first in line when hurricanes and fires arrive. FEMA even uses a Waffle House index — the operating status of local restaurants as a gauge of how badly a storm has hit.²

The man responsible for knowing what a Waffle House means believes God once moved him to one — though he was, by his own account, heavily medicated during cancer treatment when it happened, and the word “teleportation” was supplied by someone else in the conversation reaching for language to describe what he’d experienced. Still, this begins and ends with him.

What Phillips believes about one strange night is less important than what his boss believes about an entire election.

Donald Trump has said, regularly and to this day, that he won the 2020 election. He did not. His claim requires believing in a coordinated fraud that penetrated Republican-controlled election machinery in multiple swing states, survived scrutiny by his own appointees, was rejected by more than sixty courts and 86 judges—including judges he had nominated—and was disavowed by his attorney general, his campaign’s own data operation, and his director of election security. It left no usable evidence despite requiring, by its own logic, thousands of participants.

Unlike Phillips’s belief, which sits still, Trump’s moves. It moved on January 6th, when a crowd arrived at the Capitol having been told the election was stolen and that the people certifying it were betraying the country. It moved through the president’s pressure campaign on state election officials, some of whom received threats in places like Michigan and Georgia. It moved through the Republican Party, reorganizing itself as a loyalty test — you were either someone who accepted the lie or someone who didn’t belong.

It is still moving. Trump says it at rallies, where he continues to repeat the claim that he never truly lost. It shapes how his administration talks about elections, who his FBI fires, who the Justice Department pursues, and who counts as a legitimate political actor and who doesn’t. Executive Order 14399 is the formalized version of the 2020 claim, turning a debunked conspiracy into a nationwide voting directive.

Phillips had a disorienting experience and built a belief around it. Trump’s belief isn’t the product of disorientation — it’s the foundation of his self-conception. He is, in his own mind, the rightful president who was robbed, which means every institution that said otherwise is corrupt, every official who certified the results is a traitor or a coward, every prosecution of his allies is retaliation by the conspirators who stole what was his. The belief doesn’t just explain one strange night. It explains everything — and it does so in a way that makes him the permanent victim of a permanent crime. That’s a useful psychology for a man who wants to hold power, because it justifies whatever he does with it. But it also means the most powerful person in the world is operating from a model of reality organized around something that didn’t happen.

The American system assumes something about presidential belief. When a president says he truly thinks something — that a foreign power is a threat, that a military action is necessary — the sincerity of the assertion is the nation’s proxy for the soundness of what underlies it. We cannot all see the intelligence. We cannot sit in the Situation Room. So we rely on the president’s word, and the weight of that word, as a stand-in for the process behind it. A president who genuinely believes Iran is a threat has, we assume, run that belief through advisors, evidence, and the machinery of consequence.

Trump’s 2020 claim corrupts that mechanism at the source. A president who has processed sixty court defeats, his own officials’ testimony, his own campaign’s data — and emerged more certain, not less — is not running his beliefs through the normal apparatus. He is running the apparatus through his beliefs. Which means that when he says he really believes something — about elections, about enemies, about wars — the sincerity of the assertion is no longer a proxy for the soundness of what underlies it. It’s just the sincerity of the machine.

Phillips believed something strange on a medicated night in Georgia and reached for language that outran the experience. Trump didn’t just assert something false. He built a machine. And it’s still running.

1. The claim came from Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem within hours of the shooting. Video released shortly after showed Pretti being tackled, disarmed, and shot in the back. Senior administration officials, including the deputy attorney general, walked the characterization back within days. The White House press secretary declined to repeat it.

2. The Waffle House Index, developed by former FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate, serves as a grounded, real-world metric for disaster recovery based on the restaurant’s operational status: Green (full menu/power), Yellow (limited menu/generator), and Red (closed/severe damage).