It absolutely has worked. It’s a tactic employed by despots and dictators around the globe past present and future. It has proven to be effective. l’ve watched outrageous claims slung by Trump and Co which turned out to be basically an admission of guilt. But it didn’t matter because the cult either refused to believe it, didn’t care, or claimed both sides are guilty of it.I think that's part of it, particularly with respect to one far-right poster here (a guy very prone to meltdowns) who laughably calls himself objective and non-partisan.
But with respect to the big picture, the "everything equals everything" approach is a deliberate strategy employed by Team Trump - - firing away with false equivalencies and accusing others of the very misconduct/criminal activity that Trump has engaged in - - in an effort to numb people to Trump's bad acts and/or to normalize them. To some extent, it's working but hopefully not well enough to get him over the top in November. I still have faith that the American voters, collectively, are not that stupid.
Another thing that is out of control that really reared its ugly head in the run up to 2016 was the mass flood of bots on social media used as subversion. They take both sides of an argument and ramp it to the extreme while the ill informed users of the sites latch on to the arguments and regurgitate the polarized view points. It’s not an organic discussion, it’s a subversive tactic employed so people with diffferent view points end up becoming boxed into war-ing beliefs.