What’s the tallest mountain in the U.S. and North America? It’s Denali, a mountain in Alaska rising over 20,000 feet above sea level. Officially, it’s been called Denali since 2015. However, President-elect Donald Trump wants to revert its name to Mount McKinley, its official name from 1917.
Trump cited William McKinley, the 25th U.S. president, as justification. He stated, “William McKinley, the 25th president of the United States, was because of the vast sums of money that he brought into our country, the person really who got us the money that President Theodore Roosevelt used to build the Panama Canal and a lot of other things. McKinley was a very good, maybe a great president. They took his name off Mount McKinley, right? That’s what they do to people.” Trump’s admiration for McKinley stems from McKinley’s use of tariffs, a policy Trump also prioritizes.
The mountain was first named Mount McKinley in 1896 by a gold prospector who supported McKinley’s presidential candidacy. It wasn’t officially adopted by the U.S. government until decades later. However, the name Denali holds a much longer history. For centuries, the indigenous Koyukon people called it Denali, a word meaning “high,” “tall,” or “the great one.” The Alaska Board of Geographic Names officially changed the mountain’s name to Denali in 1975, though this was blocked at the federal level by an Ohio congressman that same year. The Interior Department’s 2015 name change cited the lack of any significant historical connection between President McKinley and the mountain or Alaska.
President-elect Trump’s proposal to change the name back to Mount McKinley, framed as an insult to Ohio, is met with opposition from his Republican colleagues in Alaska. Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) stated, “Awful, awful idea! We already went through this with President Trump back in the very, very beginning of his first term, when Senator Sullivan and I went to his office and we were talking about a whole range of things and he raised that issue then. And both Dan and I leaned into it and said, ‘no, bad idea.’ This is not only something Alaskans heartily endorse and support. It is a name that is, has been around for thousands of years.” This highlights a continuing disagreement over the mountain’s name.