Trump Trolls Obama Over Name of America’s Tallest Peak
The president-elect says the name of the Alaskan mountain should never have been changed.
Illustration by Eric Faison/The Daily Beast/Getty Images
Donald Trump said he will reverse President Obama’s decision to rename North America’s highest mountain.
The peak was officially known as Mount McKinley from 1917 until 2015, when then-President Barack Obama renamed it Denali, as the mountain was known by indigenous Alaskans.
Now Trump says he plans to revert the name to honor William McKinley, America’s 25th president.
“They took his name off Mount McKinley, that’s what they do to people,” he said.
“McKinley was a very good, maybe a great president,” the president-elect told supporters at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest in Phoenix on Sunday, adding that the statesman helped raise a “vast amount of money” to help pay for the Panama Canal and other projects.
“That’s one of the reasons that we are going to bring back the name of Mount McKinley, because I think he deserves it.
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“There are lots of things we can name but I think he deserves it. That’s not very gracious for somebody who did a great job,” he told the right-wing convention in a thinly-veiled swipe at Obama.
The U.S. Department of the Interior order signed by Obama to change the name to Denali noted that McKinley had never visited the mountain and had no “significant historical connection to the mountain or to Alaska.”
The Republican Alaska senator, Lisa Murkowski, was quick to oppose Trump’s proposal, posting a photo of the summit on X, formerly known as Twitter, and writing: “There is only one name worthy of North America’s tallest mountain: Denali - the Great One.”
There is only one name worthy of North America’s tallest mountain: Denali - the Great One.https://t.co/eT248xLxJC
— Sen. Lisa Murkowski (@lisamurkowski) December 23, 2024
A gold prospector came up with the name originally in 1896 after hearing that McKinley had won the Republican presidential nomination and it was made official 21 years later.
The state of Alaska changed the name to Denali—which means the “Great One” in the native Kokuyon language—in 1975 and spent decades pressing the federal authorities to follow suit.
McKinley served as president from 1897 until his assassination in 1901.
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