I think that the whole Hunter Biden laptop thing is just a symptom of the whole troll mentality.
I think it's far worse than that.
Trump was impeached for attempting to extort Ukraine for dirt on Joe Biden.
Trump was forever under a cloud of nepotistic corruption as well as privately making money through his role as President.
Therefore we have Hunter Biden's laptop and supposed links to Ukraine. It doesn't matter that Hunter Biden does not hold any government office whatsoever, it's just a two-pronged bothsides argument, you've got the "family member under a cloud" and "something something Ukraine".
Why are bothsides arguments so commonplace with American conservatives? Logically, a bothsides argument is a really shit general-purpose argument, because team A is basically saying that team B has done something at least as bad as something team A did, so usually sensible people limit bothsides arguments to pointing out that an opponent is being a hypocrite, but that only works if it's a valid comparison, which particularly in GQP era America it isn't.
If one attempts to use a bothsides argument in situations other than pointing out hypocrisy, then they're saying that team A is as bad as team B is, at which point one (assuming one is a reasonably logical person who attempts to consistently apply some kind of ethical code) logically should question why they're still supporting said team, and such a question weakens their level of belief in their team. This doesn't happen with American conservatives, they just trot out a bothsides argument and then carry on mentally fellating the GQP.
So then you've got a situation where a conservative knows that their team is morally shit but carries on supporting them anyway. When one does not hold ones self accountable to some kind of consistent moral code then basically anything goes, it's all a means to an end. Conservatism is a really lame and inconsistent appeal to nostalgia to begin with, which leaves conservative supporters wide open to radicalisation.
IMO an example of this phenomenon brought to an extreme conclusion is when the Nazis knew they were losing the war so they started destroying evidence of their war crimes (e.g. concentration camps). Why? All the time that they were torturing and killing people for the sake of a specific flavour of white supremacy, the official line was that they were morally right, then suddenly... they weren't. Surely if they completely believed that they were morally correct, they would have attempted to continue their crusade until they were stopped by the opposing force.