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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/34380
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

It is completely unproblematic, if real people are part of the world that your fictional characters inhabit. For example, your detective Smith might see President Trump on tv and hear part of a speech that the real president actually held. If you make sure that you represent these real people accurately (that is, you don't misquote them) and in a neutral manner (that is, you don't defame them), then everything is fine.

Is is extremely problematic, on the other hand, if you use real people as active characters, that is, if you have real people do and say things in your novel that they haven't (verifyably) done or said in reality. It is problematic for two reasons:

1. Every person has a right to their own outward appearance and story. If you want to use their likeness in a publication, you have to ask their permission (and a literary description such as a name is a "likeness" in this sense, too). And if you want to narrate a part of their lives – and it doesn't matter if what you tell has happened or was made up –, you have to ask their permission, too. This is why you read in the newspaper that this or that film company has bought the right to make a movie of the life of a certain person.

2. Every portrayal of a real person, no matter how well-meaning and benign, can always be seen by that person of a misrepresentation of themselves.

Authors, film makers, and other artists have faced court cases over both reasons. The easy way to avoid this is to use fictional presidents and other fictional celebrities.

There are, for example, many Hollywood movies in which the President of the United States plays some role, but it is invariably a fictional president who gives the order to attack the aliens or whatever. Real presidents only appear in movies about major historic events (such as the Kennedy assassination), and usually these presidents are no longer alive, that is, they are "historic persons".

In your case, using a fictional president doesn't affect your story at all, as your story is not about Trump, but about a certain kind of person in a certain kind of office, and just as crime writers don't have to use real detectives to show how a murderer is caught, you don't need a real president to show what a president might do wrong (or right).

Original score: 6