Last April, the Pentagon, looking for a command post situated close to the Manhattan home of the newly inaugurated president, signed a lease for a duplex on the 66th and 67th floors in Trump Tower, on Fifth Avenue. The 3,475-square-foot apartment was ideal as far as the Defense Department was concerned. The only apartment that shares the top floors of the building with Donald Trump’s penthouse triplex, it was close to the president physically, and the proximity enabled secure electronic communications. It was also protected enough that the nuclear football could be housed there when Trump was in residence. The Defense Department assured Congress that Trump would not benefit from the deal, and this, at least financially, was correct: the condominium apartment’s owner is not Trump himself but Joel R. Anderson, an Alabama businessman, a longtime neighbor and friend of Trump’s, and a member of the building’s condominium board.

The apartment was not listed on the market, and so it was some time before the details of the rental deal were revealed. According to The Wall Street Journal, which obtained a copy of the lease, the Pentagon had agreed to pay $2.39 million of taxpayers’ money for an 18-month rental, or a head-spinning $130,000 a month. When asked about the stratospheric price, Anderson told The Washington Post that the federal government didn’t really try to negotiate a lower rent. There is at least one rental in Manhattan these days that is more expensive—a 4,786-square-foot apartment on the 39th floor of the Pierre hotel, at $500,000 a month. But that includes the use of a chauffeur-driven Jaguar. Other obscenely expensive rentals are not hard to find in New York—at the Time Warner Center, on Fifth and Park Avenues, in the soaring new glass towers in Midtown—but they hover between $75,000 and $125,000 a month.

The elevators go to the 68th floor—where Trump owns a triplex. But the building has only 58 stories.

What stands out about the Pentagon deal—aside from the waste of taxpayer money for an apartment in a building that Trump has visited only once since it was rented—is that anyone (in their right mind or otherwise) has been willing to pay that much for an apartment in Donald Trump’s tower. The Pentagon’s rent bill is about three times the next-highest rent in Trump Tower—$50,000 a month in 2016 for a slightly larger unfurnished apartment—at a time when both sales and rentals in the building have slumped. Since Trump’s November electoral win, at least 14 apartments have been put up for sale. Those came to market along with apartments that were for sale before the election. By this fall, there were 19 unsold apartments, some of which had been languishing for months—their prices dropping steadily by as much as 15 percent. Others have been pulled from the market. The same has been true for rentals—14 apartments were on the market shortly after the election, only 5 of which have been rented. The others were taken off the market. At one point 10 percent of the building’s 231 units were for sale or for rent.

To a certain extent, this reflects softness in the market for luxury apartments in New York. With the recent epidemic in construction of super-luxe skyscrapers—One57, 432 Park Avenue, Central Park Tower, among them—the market for the very rich has shifted in favor of buyers. Yet even compared with other high-end buildings, Trump Tower’s per-square-foot sales prices are weak. They are down 13 percent on average in 2017 over 2016 and 23 percent compared to 2015, according to a CityRealty.com report cited by The Wall Street Journal, while Midtown buildings saw a slight increase over that time, according to Brown Harris Stevens. But Trump Tower has its own special issues. “It is dealing with things that are unprecedented in this kind of a property,” says Rana Williams, of Keller Williams, who has been handling sales and rentals in Trump Tower for years.

ALL THAT GLITTERS

Inside Donald Trump’s penthouse atop Trump Tower. By Sam Horine.

The elevators gleam gold. In the lobby of the soaring glass tower, there is a five-story atrium and a 60-foot waterfall. The floors and walls are lined with Breccia Pernice marble, which was also used in Trump’s own triplex—so much of it that an entire mountain in Italy was demolished, Ivana Trump wrote, only half joking. Trump Tower was completed in 1983 in partnership with Equitable Life Assurance, which owned the land. It was for many years Donald Trump’s signature building. The elevators still go to the 68th floor—where Trump owns the triplex penthouse. But the building has only 58 stories. He has also claimed that his penthouse home—with its miles of marble and 24-karat-gold plating—is 33,000 square feet, but it’s about one-third of that, just short of 11,000 square feet. The phantom 10 floors and extra square-footage, like so much else these days, exist only in Trump’s flamboyant imagination.