The Leverage is a novel, but many of the characters in it are not fictional. A President, justices, senators, lawyers — many dead, some very much alive. That creates an obligation that most thriller writers don’t take on: if you’re going to put words in the mouth of a real, living person, you need to be able to show your work.
My mechanism for showing my work is verbatim quotation. When Donald Trump goes on an extended diatribe in Chapter 10 about his uncle John Trump, MIT, and the Unabomber, every word that the novel puts in his mouth is a word he actually said, in a real speech, on camera. I took literary license with the venue and the audience — the setting is invented. The words are 100% Trump. If you don’t believe me, the Source Register has a link to the video.
The Source Register started as a private tracking document (it is up to version 20 or so now) where I compiled the research supporting the book as I wrote it. I think of it as the set of footnotes you’d find in a work of nonfiction, except the book is a novel. This website is that tracking document, made public. For any scene where you find yourself wondering did that really happen or did he really say that, the Register is where you’ll find the answer. More often than you’d expect, the answer is yes.