President Donald Trump's inauguration speech received horrified reactions over much of its content — but one bit in particular attracted much derision: his fixation on changing the name of Denali, an Alaskan mountain with the tallest peak in North America, to its older name of Mt. McKinley.
The mountain, which never had any connection to President William McKinley and was only named as such by a local prospector who happened to support his campaign in 1896, was long referred to as Denali by residents of Alaska, even committed conservatives, as the proper and more historically meaningful name given by local indigenous tribes. It was officially recognized as Denali by former President Barack Obama's administration in 2015, to the general support of Alaskans.
Commenters on social media largely mocked and criticized Trump's obsession with wanting to revert the U.S. government's recognition of the indigenous name.
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"Trump is really going after Native Americans with references to Manifest Destiny, the Frontier, Wild West and erasing Denali’s name," wrote Brett Chapman, an indigenous attorney based in Tulsa, Oklahoma. "This anti-Indigenous inaugural address sounds like one from the 1800s when presidents deployed the U.S. military on Native Americans seeking rights."
"Can someone far smarter than me explain to me why the name of a mountain in Alaska is even remotely on the top 10,000 issues facing this country?" wrote transit commentator Hayden Clarkin. "Who is this for?"
"Virtually no one here in Alaska calls it McKinley. It's Denali," wrote Anchorage Assembly member Daniel Volland.
"He literally used the term 'manifest destiny,'" wrote MSNBC anchor Joy Reid. "Not long after declaring himself a 'peacemaker and unite' and slagging indigenous people by vowing to return Denali to being called 'Mount McKinley.' And I guess he's gonna sell Mars to Elon and them, or something..."
"Ask Lisa Murkowski what she thinks about Denali," wrote The Independent's Washington bureau chief Eric Michael Garcia, referring to the state's longtime conservative Republican senator who passionately supports the indigenous name.