Donald Trump has pledged to restore the traditional name of America's tallest mountain after it was changed by President Obama.

For more than a century, the 20,000-foot Alaskan mountain was called Mt. McKinley, after 25th President William McKinley, who was assassinated in 1901.

Trump to restore mountain's name

A gold prospector named the mountain after McKinley in 1896, while McKinley was a presidential candidate. The federal government called it Mt. McKinley until 2015, when Barack Obama changed it by executive order to "Denali", adopting the native Indian name.

Alaska had renamed the mountain to Denali decades earlier, but Republicans from McKinley's native Ohio fought for years to stop the federal government from altering the traditional Mt. McKinley name.

At a Turning Point USA event on Sunday, Trump said he would bring the old name back in honor of the 25th president.

“McKinley was a very good, maybe a great president. They took his name off Mount McKinley. That’s what they do to people,” Trump said at AmFest in Phoenix, Arizona.

“President McKinley was the president that was responsible for creating a vast sum of money,” he said. “That’s one of the reasons that we’re going to bring back the name of Mount McKinley, because I think he deserves it.”

Trump shows love for McKinley

Both of Alaska's Republican senators, Lia Murkowski and Dan Sullivan, have opposed Trump' s efforts to restore the original name of Mt. McKinley.

"We already went through this with President Trump back and at the very, very beginning of his first term," Murkowski told KTUU. "[Denali] is a name that has been around for thousands of years… North America’s tallest mountain – shouldn’t it have a name like ‘The Great One’?" Murkowski added.

Trump has shown admiration for President McKinley, who helped turn the U.S. into a global power at the turn of the 20th century. McKinley led the U.S. to victory in the Spanish-American war, which yielded overseas territories around the globe for the United States.

In a nod to McKinley's expansionist vision, Trump has pushed to buy Greenland and take back the Panama Canal as he prepares for his second term. Trump, an advocate of tariffs, has also cited McKinley's protectionist agenda as an economic blueprint for the second Trump administration.

Like Trump, McKinley was the target of an assassination attempt, but the one on McKinley was unfortunately successful. He died just six months into his second term.