I feel like the real problem here isn’t even that the head of FEMA disaster response thinks he got teleported to a Waffle House in the middle of the night but that the Newspaper Of Record felt the need to carefully investigate this nonsense.
@dan It seems to me that the paper had three alternatives:
1/ Do not report this at all. This leaves the readership uninformed, which is not good.
2/ Report that Mr Phillips has lost all contact with reality. This is likely to result in law suits from Trump, which might be existential for the paper.
3/ Report it "seriously". This has the same effect with the readership, but with less danger of a law suit.
