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The name of Denali, the highest mountain in North America, became a subject of dispute in 1975, when the Alaska Legislature asked the U.S. federal government to officially change its name from "Mount McKinley" to "Denali". The name Denali is based on the Koyukon name of the mountain, Deenaalee ('the high one').
The executive order directs the reinstatement of the name "Mount McKinley" to the highest peak in North America, reversing the 2015 decision to call it by its centuries-old name Denali, and orders the renaming of the northern part of the Gulf of Mexico to the "Gulf of America".
In 1896, a gold prospector named it "Mount McKinley" in support of then-presidential candidate William McKinley, who later became the 25th president; McKinley's name was the official name recognized by the federal government of the United States from 1917 until 2015.
Trump has since returned to this theme, claiming in a speech in January 2025: "McKinley was a very good, maybe a great president. They took his name off Mount McKinley. That's what they do to people."
In 2015, under former President Obama, the Department of the Interior officially changed the mountain’s name from Mount McKinley to Denali, 40 years after Alaska made the same name change.
The order instructs that the highest mountain in the U.S. in Alaska be restored to its original 1917 name, Mount McKinley, in honor of the 15th president of the United States, William McKinley.
Mount McKinley National Park was renamed Denali National Park and Preserve in 1980 (the eponymous mountain itself was renamed Denali by the state government in 1975, [1] and the federal government in 2015, [2] but the federal government reverted the name of the mountain itself to Mount McKinley in 2025)
The federal government officially recognized the mountain, which stands at a staggering 20,310 feet, as Mount McKinley in 1917. Before then, Indigenous groups had their own names for it, including ...