Trump Renames North America's Tallest Mountain After A President Who Never Saw It, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That The Peak Was Still Being Called What Alaskans Call It

WASHINGTON. In an executive order signed hours after taking the oath of office, President Donald J. Trump on Monday directed the Interior Department to strip the 20,310-foot Alaskan peak known as Denali of that name and restore its designation as Mount McKinley, resolving a long-standing concern that North America's tallest mountain was still being called what the people living beside it had called it for centuries.

The summit, referred to as Denali, meaning roughly "the high one" in the Koyukon Athabascan language, had carried the McKinley name since 1896, when a gold prospector affixed it in honor of a presidential candidate from Ohio who was not then, and would never become, aware of the mountain's existence. The Obama administration formally recognized the name Denali in 2015 at the request of the state of Alaska, which had been asking Washington to do so since 1975. The new order returns the honor to William McKinley, the 25th president, who was assassinated in 1901 having never once traveled to the territory now bearing his name again.

"We will restore the name of a great president, William McKinley, to Mount McKinley, where it should be and where it belongs," Trump said in his inaugural address, adding that "President McKinley made our country very rich through tariffs and through talent." The president has repeatedly cited McKinley, an architect of the 1890 tariff that bears his name, as a personal model for his own trade agenda.

Alaska's Republican senators, who had spent years securing the Denali designation, greeted the reversal with the enthusiasm of officials informed that a decade of their work had been undone by a document they were not shown in advance. A source within the administration confirmed that the renaming had been evaluated against a rigorous internal standard, namely whether it would annoy the correct people, and had passed comfortably.

Interior Department officials noted that the change would require updating maps, signs, and federal databases across the state, a process expected to cost a measurable sum of money and accomplish nothing else. Koyukon and other Alaska Native communities, for whom the name Denali predates the McKinley presidency by an interval best expressed in centuries, were not consulted.

At press time, the president was reportedly reviewing a list of additional geographic features currently named after the wrong things, including several bodies of water, a mountain range, and the country.