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I have a few ideas about that ranging from the boring to insane conspiracy bullshit.
A decent amount of people, myself included, have chosen to register as republican despite not really aligning themselves with the party. PA is a closed primary state so if you want a vote in the primaries you basically have to choose R or D, I personally went Republican on my registration because in general I can live with whoever the Democrats put up, they may not be my first, third, or 20th choice of candidate, but on the Republican side there are mostly only bad choices, and I'd rather try to head off the worst of them before they make it to the general election. In other cases it might just be down to a coin flip.
A lot of PA is pretty damn red, in some cases you may not have many or even any Democrat candidates in your local elections, and the ones you do have don't really have a snowballs chance in hell, so you might as well try to work with what you got on the Republican side.
Or maybe even you just registered as a Republican because that's what your parents told you to do when you got your driver's license and never bothered to change it. Maybe you just kind of figured that's what everyone did, or maybe you've had a change of heart since registering.
There are still some never-trump type Republicans out there, some of them even have their heads screwed on mostly correctly. Someone who sees trump as damaging to their party, or maybe even democracy while holding other Republican values may want him and his ilk taken out.
Again, some Republicans do have their heads screwed on mostly right, and maybe they feel very strongly about one of the many things Trump will obviously make worse.
Starting with the conspiracy bullshit - someone wanted to make trump a martyr to galvanize the Republican base. Maybe they only intended to wound him, maybe they did want to kill him. Maybe it's a publicity stunt orchestrated by Trump himself or other high ranking Republicans, maybe it's a lone actor who decided that it would really get Republicans motivated.
They know Trump is overall pretty incompetent, and felt he has already served the role he was needed for and wanted him out of the picture so that someone just as evil but actually good at his job could step into his shoes.
Even more radical Republicans who think that trump doesn't go far enough in advancing their race war, or christofascist, or whatever insane bullshit they want to bring about.
Putin is sick of his shit, or some other foreign actor helped bring this about.
Just plain ol' mental illness and trying to understand the motivation here isn't going to get you very far because it's not based on anything approaching logic.
I reg'd as R as a 20-something, but have only voted R once (2000 election), just never bothered to change my registration once I realized voting R was a bad choice.
I'm actually in the first camp as well, I'd rather have some amount of control over who the opposition is, and I like to keep tabs on what kind of rhetoric/propaganda the other side is pushing on their base. It looks like the shooter may have been in this camp as well, based on the reporting I've seen. A BBC story notes he was a registered Republican, but that he had made a donation to a liberal political group, ActBlue, in 2021. So I think it's probably going to be pinned on Democrats trying to be the violent ones, even though it has literally been Trump & co stirring up shit for years and basically guaranteeing that something like this would happen.
I heard on the news that he donated to ActBlue™ so that definitely tells some of the story.
$15... when he was 17.
And I think they just have a donation from someone with his common first and last name. No middle name, no birth date. The only confirmed info says he's a registered Republican.
This doesn't even matter. Guns are the issue.