By Kanishka Singh
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President-elect Donald Trump said on Sunday he will rename Denali, the Alaska Native name for North America’s tallest mountain, in honor of William McKinley, the 25th president of the United States who was assassinated in 1901.
In 2015, former Democratic President Barack Obama officially renamed the mountain Denali, siding with the state of Alaska and ending a decades-long naming battle. The peak was officially called Mount McKinley since 1917.
“They took his name off Mount McKinley,” Trump said in a speech to supporters in Phoenix. “He was a great president,” said Trump, a Republican, adding that his administration “will bring back the Mount McKinley name because I think it deserves it.”
The mountain, which has an elevation of more than 20,000 feet (6,100 meters), was named Mount McKinley in 1896 after a gold prospector exploring the region learned that McKinley, an advocate of the gold standard, had won the Republican nomination for president.
The U.S. Department of the Interior, in the 2015 order signed by Obama renaming Denali, noted that McKinley had never visited the mountain and had “no significant historical connection to the mountain or Alaska.”
Denali, the local Athabascan name, meaning “the High One,” was officially designated as the name of the peak in 1975 by the state of Alaska, which then lobbied the federal government to also adopt the name.
Alaska lawmakers had since asked the U.S. Board on Geographic Names to officially change the name to Denali, but it had been blocked for decades.
Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski rejected Trump’s promise to rename the mountain.
“There is only one name worthy of the tallest mountain in North America: Denali, the Great,” Murkowski wrote in a post on X.
McKinley, who served two terms as governor of Ohio before becoming president in 1897, led the country to victory in the Spanish-American War and raised protective tariffs to promote American industry, according to the White House website on presidents.