In June 2026, a claim began to circulate online that U.S. President Donald Trump sought to sell Puerto Rico to acquire Greenland.
The online betting platform Polymarket posted the claim on its X account (archived):
(X user @Polymarket)
The claim also spread on Facebook, and Snopes readers reached out seeking to confirm the veracity of the claim.
The rumor stems from a June 15, 2026, article in The New Yorker, which cited former Department of Homeland Security Chief of Staff and whistleblower Miles Taylor as saying Trump was interested in buying Greenland and getting rid of Puerto Rico.
Snopes has reached out to Taylor asking for more details about his claim. We will update this story should we receive their response. Until then, we've left this claim unrated.
Taylor made claim in 2020
The rumor first circulated in 2020, when Taylor went on the cable news channel then known as MSNBC (now MS NOW) and made the claim:
In the Aug. 19, 2020, video, Taylor can heard telling MSNBC presenter Hallie Jackson (at the 5:42 mark):
He [Trump] told us ... not only did he want to purchase Greenland, he said he wanted to see if we could sell Puerto Rico, could we swap Puerto Rico for Greenland because, in his words, Puerto Rico was dirty and the people were poor. These are Americans, Hallie.
The 2022 book "The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021," by New York Times journalist Peter Baker and New Yorker reporter Susan Glasser, cited this claim.
Taylor the whistleblower
On Sept. 5, 2018, The New York Times ran an unsigned opinion piece from a Trump administration insider that read, in part:
The dilemma — which he does not fully grasp — is that many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.
I would know. I am one of them.
To be clear, ours is not the popular "resistance" of the left. We want the administration to succeed and think that many of its policies have already made America safer and more prosperous.
But we believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic.
In October 2020, two years after his appearance on MSNBC, Taylor said he was the person behind the anonymous piece. The New York Times has since updated the article to note his authorship.
In April 2025, two months after he took office for his second term, Trump signed a memorandum revoking Taylor's security clearance, calling the former official "a bad-faith actor who weaponized and abused his government position, prioritizing his own ambition, personal notoriety, and monetary gain over fidelity to his constitutional oath."
In response, Taylor sent a letter to inspectors general at the Department of Justice asking them to investigate Trump's memo, suggesting it amounted to retaliation.
For further reading, Snopes has extensively covered Trump's efforts to take over Greenland in early 2026, including the claim that a former NATO general said that Europe would need to be ready to fight if the U.S. moved on the northern territory.