> During the announcement of the tariffs and the subsequent period, pretty much everything I had invested dropped across the board

Noise. The drop was short lived, the news was used as an excuse to take some profits and realign portfolios, a lot of other announcements wrt tariffs looked a lot like market manipulation too.

Then the market figured that foreign competition is being stomped in the mud and the officially sanctioned inflation is the new and endless excuse for higher prices and profits without actually increasing production in a monopolized and cartelized economic environment.