Donald Trump warned on Wednesday that his supporters could riot at the Republican convention in Cleveland if he is not “automatically” made the party’s nominee if he arrives with the most votes but fails to secure a majority of convention delegates.

Speaking to Chris Cuomo on CNN, Trump said that he hoped to win the nomination outright before the convention in July, but warned that if he goes to Cleveland with more delegates than any of his rivals and the nomination goes to anyone else, “I think you’d have riots.”

He went on to argue that since many of his voters were new to the process, they might simply refuse to accept the Republican Party rules that make it possible to deny the nomination to a candidate who won the most votes but did not secure a majority of delegates.

“I’m representing a tremendous — many, many millions of people — in many cases, first-time voters. These are people that haven’t voted because they never believed in the system,” he said.

“Now, if you disenfranchise those people and you say, ‘Well, I’m sorry, but you’re 100 votes short, even though the next one is 500 votes short,’ I think you would have problems like you’ve never seen before. I think bad things would happen, I really do. I believe that. I wouldn’t lead it but I think bad things would happen.”

Trump made his remarks as analysts like Harry Enten of FiveThirtyEight reported that it remains quite possible that Trump could fail to win the majority of delegates he needs through the primaries.

Asked about Trump’s comments later on CNN, Sean Spicer, a spokesperson for the Republican National Committee, said, “I assume he’s speaking figuratively.”

However, the candidate has repeatedly expressed nostalgia for “the good old days” when protesters could expect to be beaten for expressing dissent, and offered to pay the legal fees of a supporter who punched a peaceful protester at one of his rallies in North Carolina last week.

Reza Akbari, a researcher on Iran at the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, pointed out on Wednesday that an image of violence at a Trump rally has already been used to mock American democracy on the front page of an Iranian newspaper.