In the special features, it mentions that the attack on the White House was planned by former Secret Service agents who were asked how they would attack it if they had to.
One trailer, used in television ads, included Emergency Alert System tones, which are used to alert television viewers about real-life emergencies. Playing them outside of emergency broadcasts or tests violates federal law. In 2014, the FCC fined ESPN, Viacom, and NBC Universal $1.93 million for using Emergency Alert System tones in non-emergency broadcasts.
There is a room in the White House called The Roosevelt Room. In this room, one of the two Roosevelts' portraits are hung in relation to the political party of the president. Teddy's portrait is hung if the president is Republican, and Franklin D.'s if the President is Democrat. When Banning (Gerard Butler) is running through the White House, in one the hallways he passes Franklin D. Roosevelt's portrait. This insinuates that Teddy Roosevelt's is in the Roosevelt Room, making President Asher (Aaron Eckhart) a Republican.
Putting North Korean terrorists in the plot was widely viewed as prescient when real-world tensions between North Korea and the U.S. emerged in 2013. In an interview, director Antoine Fuqua said he did not want the film's villains to be from the Middle East, because he felt other films had covered that to the point of saturation. North Korea was interesting to him because it was completely closed off to the outside world, and no one really knew what it wanted or was capable of doing.