President-elect Trump on Sunday pledged to erase Alaska’s Mount Denali name and restore its prior designation as Mount McKinley, casting the provocative move both as a suitable honor for one of his 19th-century predecessors and as a rebuke to 21st-century woke culture.
Citing in particular former President William McKinley’s use of tariffs on imports, Trump included the mountain renaming in a grab bag of preinauguration threats and promises that ranged from taking back the Panama Canal to once more naming military bases for Civil War Confederate officers.
“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 told an enthusiastic audience at a conference in Arizona, adding that “we’re going to bring back the name of Mount McKinley, because I think he deserves it. There are lots of things we can name, but I think he deserves it.”
Alaskan elected officials quickly denounced Trump’s notion of stripping an Alaska Native name from the 20,310-foot-high mountain.
