>

Money laundering isn't secretly smart, it's illegal and stupid, especially when it's probably mafia money. The loss of them is the point of having them.
Didn’t need his tax returns to know he was dumb af and shitty at business. >

He bankrupted 3 casinos because he didn’t understand the simple business concept of flooding a market.  He opened one and it was a success, so he opened two more, with pretty much the same concept less than a mile from each other in Atlantic City.
They basically cannibalized each other’s clients and he went from having one full casino to having three mostly empty ones.  For those who say he was not using his money and just fleecing the investors, some of that is true, but Trump tried to make the casinos work, so much so that the he tried to make the last one work for decades despite years of loses and finally shutting it down in 2015.
Furthermore, he kept trying to make his casino work by opening another one that also failed in Gary, Indiana.   
Trump loved the glamour of owning a casino, he was just terrible at running them. >

I thought he used those casinos as disposable money laundering schemes >

There's always someone who has a way Trump's shitty failure is secretly smart but it's usually just a shitty failure. Even if it was a money laundering scheme, why not actually make legit money too? Doesn't that make it easier and more profitable to launder money?