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Share to FacebookShare to TwitterShare to LinkedinChinese President Xi Jinping and Donald Trump attend a welcoming ceremony November 9, 2017 in Beijing, China.

Thomas Peter-Pool/Getty Images During the four years that Donald Trump occupied the White House, the state-owned Industrial and Commercial Bank of China paid him an estimated $7 million to rent space in Trump Tower. Despite the extraordinary circumstances of the deal—involving the government of China, the president of the United States, and millions of dollars—the Trump family portrayed the agreement as a standard business transaction. Previously unreported documents call that characterization into question.

Lending records show that that the Chinese bank abandoned Trump Tower around the time Trump left the White House. The bank’s departure seemed to come suddenly, in the first half of 2021 and less than two years after the bank exercised what Eric Trump, the former president’s son, described as a five-year extension. It’s hard to consider either of those developments—the lease extension or the sudden departure—without wondering whether China was trying to curry favor.

There’s no evidence that geopolitics played a role in the deal at first. Reports of the arrangement surfaced in September 2008, when Trump was merely a real estate developer, eager to tout some good news amid troubled times. “It is a great honor to house one of the world’s finest banking institutions in Trump Tower,” he told Real Estate Weekly at the time. “We look forward to a long and happy relationship with them.”

It was a lucrative deal for Trump. A 2012 debt prospectus noted that ICBC was the second-largest tenant in Trump Tower, leasing 20,000 square feet for about $1.9 million a year, paying a higher price per square foot than other office tenants in the building. “I’ll show you the Industrial Bank of China,” Trump told three Forbes journalists in 2015, when he was leading polls for the Republican presidential nomination—and still keeping a close eye on his business. “I have the best tenants in the world in this building.”

Three years later, ICBC signed a new deal to lease space in a non-Trump building on Sixth Avenue, securing 99,000 square feet, or roughly five times its footprint at Trump Tower. With ICBC’s lease set to expire in 2019, according to the prospectus, it would have made sense if the bank departed Trump’s building at that point.

But the Trump Tower lease was no longer a typical business deal. Trump was in the White House, waging a massive trade war with China. The roughly $2 million of annual Trump Tower rent had turned into a constitutional concern, given that the Emoluments Clause prohibits the president from accepting various benefits from foreign governments. The deal had also become a strange example of collaboration between China and the United States, one that America’s adversary had reason to maintain while it continued to negotiate far more consequential matters.

ICBC ended up staying in Trump Tower. Weeks before the bank’s lease had been set to expire, Eric Trump explained on stage at a conference that the bank was keeping a couple of floors, noting that its lease had come with two five-year options to renew. The younger Trump ignored questions about why the bank would need the space, given that it had just signed a much-bigger lease in the same neighborhood. “I don’t think there is anybody that has been tougher on China in the world than my father,” he said.

In 2021, when Joe Biden took office, the Chinese bank apparently came to the conclusion that it was no longer the smartest idea to be renting space from Donald Trump. Representatives of ICBC and the Trump Organization did not respond to requests for comment for this story. Forbes did manage to connect with someone answering the phones at ICBC’s branch in Queens. That person confirmed that ICBC no longer has any space in Trump Tower.

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