Even as President Donald Trump painted another dark picture of America during his second inaugural address — “Our government confronts a crisis of trust,” he said — there was also a more hopeful theme in his speech: Manifest Destiny.
As the newly sworn-in president signs an ambitious slate of executive orders in his first days in office, he has also set his sights on the literal expansion of the United States.
Trump spoke of the U.S. as a “growing nation” — not just in wealth, but in expanding territory, one that “carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons.”
“And we will pursue our Manifest Destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars,” Trump said.
“Manifest Destiny into the stars” may usually be taken as figurative, but it may be far more literal when SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is at Trump’s side. And Mars is hardly the extent of Trump’s ambitions.
In his address on Monday, he spoke of a “tide of change” sweeping the country. “Sunlight is pouring over the entire world,” he said.
“Americans pushed thousands of miles through a rugged land of untamed wilderness. They crossed deserts, scaled mountains, braved untold dangers, won the Wild West,” Trump said. “If we work together, there is nothing we cannot do and no dream we cannot achieve.”
He mentioned taking back the Panama Canal and changing the Gulf of Mexico’s name to the Gulf of America.
And in case anyone doubted his ability to expand America’s reach — Trump has also recently brought up purchasing Greenland and making Canada part of the United States — he also said he stood before Congress as “proof that you should never believe that something is impossible.”
“In America, the impossible is what we do best,” he said.
But as part of this vision, Trump also said he’d change the name of Denali — the highest peak in North America — back to Mount McKinley. The Alaska Legislature first asked the federal government to change the mountain’s name in 1975, with Denali roughly translating to “the great one” or “the high one” in the Koyukon Athabaskan language.
After years of reluctance to change the name at the risk of angering the swing state of Ohio — President William McKinley’s home state — President Barack Obama’s interior secretary at the time, Sally Jewell, made the switch to Denali in 2015 with a secretarial order.
“I was delighted to find out that I, in fact, had that authority,” Jewell told NOTUS Monday night. “It was probably one of the decisions that I made that was the most universally popular.”
But Trump said he was inspired by McKinley, who “made our country very rich through tariffs and through talent.”
“He was a natural businessman,” Trump said of McKinley, who he also pointed out helped make the Panama Canal a reality.
Trump has threatened to change Denali’s name before. In his first term, Trump and then-Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke both discussed the issue with Alaska Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan.
Both Republicans shot it down, and that was enough for Zinke to keep Denali.
“I made phone calls to the senators and the governor, and talked to the people in Alaska and there was a consensus they had settled on Denali,” Zinke recalled to NOTUS after Trump’s latest inauguration speech.
“I was good with Denali. The state was good with Denali. And, a lot of times, I defer such decisions to the state,” Zinke said.
Jewell, for her part, doubted that Trump actually has the legal authority to change the name again.
“There’s a process,” she said. “People can request that a name be changed, but if there are objections, then it doesn’t change unless a reasonable period of time has passed.”
But on Monday night, Trump signed an executive order on “American Greatness” that changed the name of Denali back to Mount McKinley.
Jewell added that the Alaska delegation was likely to mount a plea to prevent the change. And sure enough, after the address, Murkowski said she was against the switch back.
Murkowski said she’s actually talked to Trump about the issue and will continue talking with him. And Sullivan — Alaska’s other senator — has supported the name Denali in the past, though he wouldn’t comment on Trump’s plan on Monday.
“You’re the first reporter that’s asked me that,” Sullivan told NOTUS, facetiously.
“I’m being very sarcastic,” he said.
Sullivan added that he hadn’t spoken to Trump about Denali “in many years.” And Alaska’s lone lawmaker in the House, Republican Rep. Nick Begich, also largely ducked the question on Monday.
“What folks in the lower 48 choose to call our mountains in Alaska is up to them, but our focus has always been on opening the state of Alaska for responsible resource development, and that’s what President Trump is doing,” Begich said.
Although the effort to rename Denali died in Trump’s first term, Zinke said he wasn’t surprised Trump had revived it.
“He had the Panama Canal and the Gulf of America,” Zinke added. “It was a funny speech.”
To Zinke, renaming the mountain is only the beginning of what Trump sees as the fulfillment of his vision for Manifest Destiny.
“Now that he has saddled up with Elon Musk, the visionary,” Zinke said, “Musk’s goals are clearly articulated as SpaceX.”
“So I think we’re going to Mars,” he said.
While Trump’s expansionist ambitions were some of the more hopeful themes of his inaugural address, not every lawmaker thought Trump’s Manifest Destiny notes were a high point of the speech.
“My grandfather spent four years in jail, alongside Gandhi in part of India’s independence against colonialism, so I certainly do not support expansionism, imperial policy,” Rep. Ro Khanna told NOTUS.
When asked how he defines Manifest Destiny, Khanna said it was a “cohesive, multiracial democracy, where every American has a great chance at fulfilling their potential and that we help other nations achieve their self-determination.”
And how does Khanna believe Trump defined it in his speech?
“As the acquisition of power,” Khanna said.
Still, other Democrats said the Panama Canal and the mission to Mars and the Gulf of America and Greenland and Canada and Mount McKinley didn’t concern them all that much.
“Remember, there is often a big gap between the rhetoric and the follow-through,” Sen. Ron Wyden said.
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Katherine Swartz is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow. Anna Kramer is a reporter at NOTUS.
Riley Rogerson, who is a reporter at NOTUS, contributed to this report.