Donald Trump is an entertainer. He is also a racist. These two facts are usually viewed as reflecting distinct and isolated facets of Trump’s personality. But we need to see them as intertwined. It’s the only way to make sense of the traveling racial-incitement show that is Trump’s campaign—and of how it’s taken him so far.

The whole “Make America Great Again” extravaganza is rooted in Trump’s persona as an entertainer, and his long immersion in spectacle—from beauty pageants to boxing, from reality television to professional wrestling. Trump is the latest in a long line of carnival barkers, sports impresarios, and insult comics who have exploited America’s racial anxieties to build large audiences in the service of a quick buck. He’s brought the mores of the taboo-pushing performer and the boxing hype-man into the political arena in ways that Ronald Reagan, Jesse Ventura, and Arnold Schwarzenegger never dreamed of. In the process, he’s cannily exploited the license given to entertainers to talk about race in offensive ways, benefiting from the forgiveness that’s extended more readily to clowns than to politicians.

In 2005, while serving as host of The Apprentice, Trump offered NBC a novel idea for re-energizing a program he felt was losing its zip: a season in which the competing teams would be divided along racial lines, black against white. “It would be nine blacks against nine whites, all highly educated, very smart, strong, beautiful,” he later explained to Howard Stern. The white team would be all-blond, but the black team would be an “assortment” of light- and dark-skinned African Americans. Even Stern was taken aback. “Wouldn’t that set off a racial war?” he asked.

The question was apt, because Trump’s idea harkened back to a form of entertainment that incited violent confrontations between black and white Americans. By the late nineteenth century, race-based entertainment, from blackface minstrelsy to ethnic joke books, had long been a profitable mainstay of American popular culture. Boxing promoters, looking to get in on the action, orchestrated matches that pitted different ethnic groups against each other: Irish pugilists against Italians, Germans against Greeks. But the most incendiary and money-making matches were between blacks and whites.

In 1908, when Jack Johnson became the first black world heavyweight champion, it triggered mass culture shock in white America—and ushered in a golden opportunity for publicists, newspaper publishers, and proto-Trumpian hype-men. The cry went out for a “great white hope” to re-establish white supremacy in what was then America’s most popular sport. Novelist Jack London, writing in the New York Herald, famously appealed to former champion Jim “Jeff” Jeffries to rise to the challenge: “Jeff, it’s up to you.” When Jeffries answered the call, the buildup to the bout was everything Trump wanted for The Apprentice: Race War, and what he has finally achieved in his campaign for president: a racially charged drama that caught the national imagination, even at the risk of inciting violence.