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(NEXSTAR) — Among the roughly 200 executive orders President Donald Trump is expected to sign during his first day in office is a declaration to restore the name of the 25th president, William McKinley, to an Alaska mountain.
Ahead of his inauguration on Monday, it was revealed that Trump would sign an order to rename Denali as Mount McKinley (and rename the Gulf of Mexico).
Why does renaming an Alaskan peak rise to the top of the list of Trump’s first-day priorities?
It appears to be a nod to an admiration for President McKinley.
In 2015, President Barack Obama bestowed the Denali name on the continent’s largest mountain in a move done to recognize “the sacred status of Denali to generations of Alaska Natives.”
At the time, Trump criticized the decision, writing on Twitter (now known as X) “President Obama wants to change the name of Mt. McKinley to Denali after more than 100 years. Great insult to Ohio. I will change back!”
He then vowed to change it back to McKinley during his first term in office. Members of Congress representing Alaska long resisted Denali becoming McKinley again. The renaming never occurred while Trump was in his first term.
He renewed that vow on Monday to restore McKinley’s name, saying during his inauguration, “… We will restore the name of a great president, William McKinley, to Mount McKinley, where it should be and where it belongs.”
Trump went on, describing McKinley as someone who “made our country very rich, through tariffs and through talent.” Trump went on to call him “a natural businessman” who “gave Teddy Roosevelt the money for many of the great things he did, including the Panama Canal.”
Trump, a former businessman himself, has also highlighted tariffs and a reclamation of the Panama Canal in recent weeks.
In 1890, McKinley, then a U.S. Representative for Ohio, led efforts to pass a tariff bill introduced in the Ways and Means committee he chaired. The bill, dubbed the McKinley Tariff, boosted “protective tariff rates of nearly 50 percent on average for many American products,” according to a report from the U.S. House of Representatives History, Art and Archives.
The tax rate on foreign products went up “dramatically,” and prices on many goods increased, the Tax Foundation explains. Some items, including coffee and sugar, were on a “free list.”
While campaigning in Michigan in September 2024, Trump told the crowd that the U.S. “was probably the wealthiest it ever was because it was a system of tariffs.”
According to the House report, the tariff, which became law under the pen of then-President Benjamin Harrison, was perceived “as a boon to wealthy industrialists” and Republicans lost over 90 seats during elections that fall.
Despite the tariff bearing his name, McKinley seemingly went unscathed in the matter. During his presidential campaign in 1896, McKinley was known to say, “I am a tariff man standing on a tariff platform,” The New York Times reports.
Trump seemingly echoed that statement in 2018, writing on Twitter, that he is “a Tariff Man.”
Robert Merry, a McKinley biographer, previously told Yahoo Finance that McKinley realized later on during his presidency that tariffs had limits and that the U.S. needed to have a better flow of goods with global trading partners. McKinley was assassinated in 1901 (making his vice president, Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th president of the U.S.) and the nation saw much lower tariffs until Trump was elected to office in 2016.
While renaming Denali is among Trump’s day one priorities, tariffs are not.
According to The Associated Press, Trump is holding off on tariffs for now, though he is expected to sign orders targeting energy prices and inflation.
So can Trump really rename Denali?
He could, using the same path Obama used — technically, his Secretary of the Interior, Sally Jewell, used her authority to rename the mountain.
Because Denali is within the U.S. boundaries, it could be a relatively simple process. Renaming the Gulf of Mexico, however, could be more complicated.
