By Eric Lichtblau

President Trump, using new emergency powers, ordered federal agents Friday to quarantine political rival Joe Biden inside bubble wrap for at least the next eight months “to stop the spread of the coronavirus and keep America great.”

The White House said that Biden will remain quarantined through at least November 4 — the day after the presidential election. The timing is “pure coincidence,” Trump told reporters. “Have you seen the shape that Joe’s in? This is for his own good,” he insisted.

Minutes after the president signed the order, Secret Service agents swarmed Biden’s lakeside home in Delaware and emerged a short time later carrying the former vice president wrapped tightly inside a giant, seven-foot-long swath of U-Haul brand bubble wrap, with an air hole punctured near the top.

Biden, sunglasses still on his face, squirmed inside the wrapping and shouted unintelligibly. As the agents loaded him into a truck bound for an undisclosed location, he punched at the bubble wrap and could be heard yelling: “Nobody puts Biden in a bubble!” His campaign later put out a statement calling the involuntary quarantine “an outrageous violation of Mr. Biden’s constitutional right to make frequent campaign gaffes and curse at autoworkers.”

Biden is the first person targeted under an emergency health program that Trump created earlier this week called the National Operation to Jail the Obsolete and Elderly. Trump said the program’s acronym — “NO JOE” — was also “just a coincidence.” Separately, the president extended his European travel ban to include all of Delaware.

A press briefing at the White House turned contentious when reporters challenged Trump to explain why he was quarantining his main presidential rival for eight months, just days after declaring that the coronavirus “will go away.”

“I’m worried about Joe,” Trump said. “I know a lot about this stuff. I learned it all from my uncle, Dr. John Trump at MIT. A real genius!”

Rudy Giuliani, who joined Trump for the announcement, chimed in as well, telling reporters that he had “rock-solid evidence from a reliable Ukrainian underworld source” that Biden and his son, Hunter, were spotted in Kyiv touching their faces repeatedly.

Trump declared that Biden’s age made him “a high-level health risk.” When reporters pointed out that Trump, at 73, is only four years younger than Biden, the president trotted out his former White House doctor, Ronny Jackson, to vouch for his robust health. “I can attest that this president has the strength of Samson, the speed of Usain Bolt, and the intellect of Einstein,” Dr. Jackson said. “He might live to be 300!”

Stocks rose sharply on the news that Biden had been bubble-wrapped, with the biggest one-day jump since Trump ordered the Fed to cut interest rates at all of his golf resorts.

ERIC LICHTBLAU is a two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and the best-selling author of The Nazis Next Door and Bush’s Law: The Remaking of American Justice. His latest book, Return to the Reich: A Holocaust Refugee’s Secret Mission to Defeat the Nazis, was released in October of 2019. He was a Washington reporter for the New York Times for fifteen years and for the Los Angeles Times for fifteen years before that. He has also written during his career for the New Yorker, TIME, the Intercept, and other publications. He has been a frequent guest on NPR, MSNBC, C-SPAN, and other networks, as well as a speaker at many universities and institutions. He lives outside Washington, D.C.