Watch: Ron DeSantis ‘can’t decide’ how to say his own name

Ron DeSantis has been accused of struggling to decide on the correct pronunciation of his own name.

He has veered between calling himself “Dee-Santis” and “Deh-Santis,” Axios reported after studying his campaign appearances in recent years.

In a radio interview in South Carolina last month, the 2024 Republican presidential candidate told listeners to go to “Ron Dee-Santis dot com”.

The same day, he told Fox News viewers that he was Ron “Deh-Santis”.

The issue has reportedly been confusing for staff working on the Florida governor’s previous campaigns.

At the start of his political career, Mr DeSantis tended to call himself “Dee-Santis” before evolving toward “Deh-Santis,” Axios reported.

His wife, Casey, appears to have always used “Deh-Santis”.

However, in campaign advertisements made for his first run for Florida governor in 2018 the couple pronounced their surname differently.

Mr DeSantis used “Dee-Santis” and his wife pronounced it “Deh-Santis”.

At that time, when his campaign was asked about it, the response was that Mr DeSantis himself preferred “Dee-Santis”.

But in January this year, when he was sworn in for a second term as governor, Florida’s chief justice addressed him as Ron “Dee-Santis” – only for the politician to then call himself “Ron Deh-Santis”.

Mr DeSantis’s presidential campaign did not respond when Axios asked how the media should correctly pronounce his name.

However, Donald Trump’s campaign responded to the Axios investigation by saying that it was an issue that mattered.

Steven Cheung, spokesman for the former US president, said: “Ron DeSantis is a phony who can’t decide how to pronounce his name. If you can’t get your name right how can you lead a country?”

‘Dee-Santis is unusual’

Mr DeSantis is of Italian-American heritage. All eight of his great-grandparents were born in Italy.

Professor William Connell, chair of Italian Studies at Seton Hall University in New Jersey, told Axios: “Day-Sahn-tees would be proper Italian but sloughing it off as Deh-Santis is common.

“But Dee-Santis is unusual because that would be spelled DiSantis in Italian.”

Bill de Blasio, the Italian-American former Democrat mayor of New York, said not having a consistent pronunciation of one’s own name was “really weird”.

When he was a child growing up in Dunedin, Florida, Mr DeSantis sometimes called himself “D” rather than “Ron”.

Politico reported last month that Mrs DeSantis seemed to have been a factor in the change of pronunciation.

Up until the 2018 campaign Mr DeSantis had said “Dee-Santis,” but his wife would soften it to “Deh-Santis”.

His then-spokesman told the Tampa Bay Times: “It’s also been a little controversial for us on the campaign trail. He uses Dee-Santis.”

When the newspaper suggested that Mrs DeSantis seemed to use “Deh-Santis”, the spokesman said: “Yes. He prefers Dee-Santis.”