I woke up on the morning of the one-year anniversary of the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol expecting to spend my whole day covering former President Donald Trump.
I didn't expect to get an earful about Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Yet that is exactly what happened.
It all started when I woke up that morning to an email from DeSantis' office alerting reporters that he would be holding a press conference in West Palm Beach, not far from where I was planning to cover a pro-Trump rally for Insider outside Mar-a-Lago later that day.
Just two days earlier, Trump abruptly canceled a press conference he was going to host at his private club in Palm Beach where he lives, but his most fervent supporters were still planning to gather at a rally down the road in a Publix supermarket parking lot.
I recently relocated from Washington, DC, to South Florida to cover the 2022 midterms, DeSantis' re-election, and the lead-up to the 2024 election. This would be my first in-person press conference with DeSantis, so I decided to attend and see if I could ask the Republican governor a few questions.