Anyone in their right might would also assume that depositors would vet the financial institutions holding their (billions of dollars of) capital, but alas here

Anyone in their right might would also assume that depositors would vet the financial institutions holding their (billions of dollars of) capital, but alas here we are. Also, I think you underestimate the amount of effort it takes to uncover something like this. There was a YouTube video posted to HN a few days ago where Marc Cohodes went over why he believed FTX was a scam a few weeks prior to the news breaking. It provided an interesting glimpse into what's required to do DD on this type of operation. It starts with good intuition, which most people don't have, and then evolves into things like hiring private investigators, or running comprehensive background checks on the officers of the company, or calling people with intimate knowledge of the inner workings, or finding ex-employees, etc. etc. etc. Now you could say, well a presidential candidate should do all that stuff. And in an ideal world, they would. But Marc Cohodes does this as a full time job and likely makes large sums of money from his vocation. It's unrealistic to expect most people, presidential candidate or otherwise, to be capable of performing that kind of DD.