Trump tells supporters he won’t be ‘stupid’ enough for peaceful transition of power if he loses
President of the United States Donald Trump speaking at the 2018 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland. Photo by Gage Skidmore.

President Donald Trump continued to spread debunked conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election during a Friday night campaign rally in Virginia.


Trump argued that it was impossible for him to lose the election, thus concluding he would be "stupid" to hand over power peacefully should he lose.

"We not gonna lose this, except if they cheat," Trump falsely claimed about the 2020 campaign, where he trails Joe Biden in national and battleground polling.

"That's the only way we're gonna lose is if there's, uh, mischief," he argued. "And it will have to be on a big scale."

"And we do want a very friendly transition, but we don't want to be cheated and be stupid and say, 'oh, let's transit -- we'll go and we'll do a transition' and we know that there were thousands and thousands of ballots that made the difference through cheating," he said, repeating the debunked conspiracy theories.

"We're not going to stand for it," he vowed. "We're not going to stand for it."

Here's how CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale described it: