Columbia University, pictured here on April 22, 2024, was under protest while Donald Trump was on trial. A year later, he’s back in power and cracking down on demonstrators.
Photo by David Dee Delgado/Getty Images
Columbia University was among the first colleges to face the wrath of Donald Trump, whose administration canceled $400 million of funding and arrested two student protesters. Harvard, Princeton, Brown, Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania have faced similar pressures. But there’s one thing that makes Columbia different from every other college in America—it pays millions of dollars in rent each year to the president of the United States.
The money flows indirectly, which might help explain why so few people have taken notice. Columbia pays about $8 million a year to lease doctors’ offices inside 1290 Avenue of the Americas in midtown Manhattan, according to a 2021 lending document obtained by Forbes. Vornado Realty Trust, a publicly traded real estate firm, owns 70% of that building and manages its operations. But the property’s largest individual owner is Donald Trump, who holds the other 30%. Strip away the layers, and the president personally receives an estimated $2.5 million of annual rent via the deal.
Columbia and Trump ended up in business with each other by accident. It all started in the early 1990s, when Trump had trouble meeting debt obligations tied to a 75-acre plot of land on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Hong Kong investors bailed him out in exchange for 70% of the property. Trump hung onto the other 30% and kept hoping to lure potential occupants. One of his targets: Columbia University, which was looking to enlarge its campus back then, according to the New York Times. Trump reportedly walked out of a negotiating session, and the Ivy League school ended up expanding elsewhere.
The real estate tycoon became incensed again in 2005, when the Hong Kong investors agreed to sell the land for $1.8 billion and reinvest the proceeds into two other buildings, 1290 Avenue of the Americas in New York and 555 California Street in San Francisco. “You can get a much higher price!” the future president complained in a note to one of his partners. Trump even tried to get out of the deal in court, where he lost, leaving him with 30% of two buildings he did not want.
In 2007, his partners sold their 70% share to Vornado. Four years later, with Vornado in control, Columbia University came back into the picture, signing a lease for about 120,000 square feet in 1290 Avenue of the Americas. The building that Trump initially rejected turned out to be a massive success. In 2012, Vornado refinanced the property, helping kick off an estimated $125 million to Trump.
Today, the president’s 30% share of the income at 1290 Avenue of the Americas appears to surpass the profit produced by any other property in his portfolio. A 2020 Forbes analysis, which estimated Trump’s annual share of the Columbia rent at $2.1 million at the time, concluded that the university was the 19th-largest tenant in his entire empire.
Nonetheless, Trump continued to antagonize the university over the years. While promoting the lie that Barack Obama was not born in America, he wondered whether the 44th president, and Columbia’s most famous alum, had applied to the school as a foreign student. During Trump’s first term in office, he lamented how former FBI Director James Comey used a Columbia professor to share information with the press. Then Trump raged in 2024, when pro-Palestinian protestors occupied Columbia’s campus.
Trump expressed frustration that authorities weren’t taking a more aggressive approach with the demonstrators, comparing the treatment of students to his own interactions with law enforcement. “Unlike at Columbia University, where the Radical Left Palestinian Protesters sat on the Front Lawn, practically took over the School, and screamed ‘Death to the Jews, Death to Israel, Death to America,’ and nothing happened to them, Lower Manhattan surrounding the Courthouse, where I am heading now, is completely CLOSED DOWN,” he said on his social-media platform Truth Social. “SO UNFAIR!!!”
Six months later, despite being convicted of 34 counts of falsifying business records in his trial, Trump reclaimed the White House. His administration clamped down on Columbia almost immediately after he took office.
