News/Commentary

INSIDER: Trump to reverse ‘woke’ name change of iconic Alaska mountain

December 24, 2024 | | Print Article

President-elect Donald Trump vowed on Sunday to rename Denali, a mountain in Alaska, to Mount McKinley in honor of 25th U.S. President William McKinley.

The catch here is that so-called Denali, a 20,000-foot tall mountain in Denali National Park and Preserve, was virtually always named Mount McKinley until 2015. That was the year that then-President Barack Obama’s interior secretary renamed it for “woke” reasons.

“Denali, meaning ‘the great one’ in the Athabaskan language of Alaska natives, was [supposedly] the original name of the mountain,” USA Today reported at the time. “But when European Americans discovered it in the 19th century, they renamed it Densmore’s Mountain and, later, Mount McKinley in an effort to boost the presidential candidacy of Republican William McKinley.”

In her order, then-Interior Secretary Sally Jewell claimed that McKinley had never even visited the mountain and had no “significant historical connection to the mountain or to Alaska.”

Returning to the present, Trump vowed during an appearance Sunday at a Turning Point USA event in Phoenix to undo Obama’s name change.

“William McKinley, the 25th president of the United States … the vast sums of money that he brought into our country,” he told the crowd. “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.”

“But President McKinley was the president that was responsible for creating a vast sum of money in the United States that Teddy Roosevelt then spent. So let’s say that they were both excellent presidents, but McKinley did that, and that’s one of the reasons that we’re going to bring back the name of Mount McKinley because I think he deserves it. I think he deserves it. There are lots of things we can name, but I think he deserves it. That was not very gracious to somebody that did a good job,”  he added.

Listen:

Trump previously looked into renaming it during his first term by asking Alaska’s senators, Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan, what they thought about the idea.

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“Lisa – Sen. Murkowski – and I jumped over the desk,” Sullivan recalled at the time to CNN. “We said no, no! The Alaska Native people named that mountain over 10,000 years ago. Denali, that was the name.”

Murkowski for her part still continues to feel similarly.

Observe:

Her opposition to the idea prompted immediate pushback on Twitter/X.

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Look:

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Vivek Saxena
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