This story was originally published by Dermot Cole, Reporting From Alaska.
Sen. Dan Sullivan and Rep. Nick Begich the Third had a timid response to Donald Trump’s decision to unilaterally change the name of Denali without asking anyone in Alaska.
Sullivan said he would prefer to keep it Denali. Begich said he didn’t care.
The only member of the Congressional delegation to say it is an awful decision is Sen. Lisa Murkowski.
“I’m totally against that,” Murkowski told reporters, Politico reported. “It is called Denali, which means the great one. So I would just suggest to President Trump, who wants to make everything great, they already have a great name for it.”
She said she spoke about this with Trump Sunday, to no avail.
Trump demands obedience and has always received it from Sullivan. Begich fell into line as soon as he got to Washington, D.C.
“What people in the lower 48 call Denali is not of my concern,” Begich said leaving Trump’s inaugural ceremony Monday afternoon, Politico reported.
“I’m focused on job creation, opportunities in Alaska,” he said. “And what we call a mountain in Alaska is of little concern to me.
Begich the Third will probably try to walk that back. He would have never said that during his campaign, but we’ll see what he says in his next campaign.
Meanwhile, Sullivan took to social media to whine about reporters asking him about Denali, a subject that makes him uncomfortable because it raises the prospect of crossing Trump.
“You know here in the Senate, we have media, Beltway media everywhere, these scrum reporters. And I will tell you this, just in the last 12 hours they have been obsessed with the topic of Denali vs. Mount McKinley,” said Sullivan.
It’s not reporters who are obsessed, it’s Trump, who wanted to do this during his first term and abandoned the idea for a while.
He ordered the name change Monday, along with his new name for the Gulf of Mexico. It’s executive arrogance in action.
“The naming of our national treasures, including breathtaking natural wonders and historic works of art, should honor the contributions of visionary and patriotic Americans in our nation’s rich past,” the Trump order says.
Ever since Trump adopted William McKinley of Ohio as a tariff hero, Trump has wanted to resurrect his name. Also driving the Trump obsession is the chance to reverse something Obama did and claim it as an accomplishment.
Trump’s order says that “after nearly a century, President Obama’s administration, in 2015, stripped the McKinley name from federal nomenclature, an affront to President McKinley’s life, his achievements, and his sacrifice.”
This high-handed move by Trump is an affront to Alaska, one of the distractions Trump dreamed up to divert attention from his campaign promises to lower food prices, end the war in Ukraine before he took office, etc.
Sullivan managed to utter a single sentence in response to the new name of the mountain in a video he posted on social media.
“Now as I’ve said many times I prefer the name Denali that was given to that great mountain by the great patriotic Koyukon Athasbascan people thousands of years ago,” Sullivan said.
That’s it. He prefers Denali.
Then Sullivan complained that reporters “have never even asked me almost in four years” about his so-called “Last Frontier Lock Up” chart, his imaginary war on Alaska.
With Trump’s command, the federal government will waste money changing maps and documents and force federal employees to call it McKinley, but most people in Alaska will continue to call it Denali, the name that has been state policy for 50 years and was in use long before the United States came into existence.
Keep it Denali, regardless of Trump’s McKinley obsession.
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