By Duvi Honig, Founder and CEO of the Orthodox Jewish Chamber of Commerce

Start with the tell. This week President Trump flew home from the NATO summit in Turkey on the old Air Force One — not the gleaming, Qatari-gifted jet he’s been showing off. Why? Because the older plane carries the full set of defensive measures and the new one doesn’t, and multiple reports tied the switch directly to the Iran threat. The President wasn’t coy about it. “I’m number one on the kill list for Iran,” he said. Israel had just handed Washington fresh intelligence — reported by The Wall Street Journal and confirmed by CNN and Fox News — pointing to a new Iranian plan to assassinate him. At the Ayatollah’s funeral, crowds waved “Kill Trump” signs and posters offering $100 million for his head.

So the commander in chief accepts, publicly, that a foreign regime is actively trying to murder him. He changes planes over it.

Now look at what that same administration put at the top of its agenda this week. A Saturday deadline — delivered to Tehran through Axios by three U.S. officials — demanding that Iran publicly declare the Strait of Hormuz open and pledge to stop shooting at tankers. Open the shipping lane by the weekend, or else.

Read those two paragraphs back to back and tell me the math works. One plus one doesn’t add up.

We are being asked to treat a plot to kill the President of the United States and a dispute over oil-tanker tolls as if they’re the same negotiation, on the same clock, with the same regime. They are not apples to apples. They are not even in the same orchard. A shipping-lane deadline has exactly nothing to do with whether Iran gets to put a bullet in the president. Reopening the strait by Saturday does not lower the kill list. It does not recall the assassins. It does not make the man safer on the older plane. So what, precisely, does it have to do with our security?

Here’s the part nobody in Washington seems willing to say out loud: you cannot run a routine maritime haggle with a government you simultaneously believe is trying to assassinate your head of state. Either the threat is real — in which case the strait is a sideshow and the entire posture should be built around the President’s life — or the threat isn’t real, in which case somebody explain the old plane. It can’t be both. Pick one. Right now the government is behaving as if both are true at once, and that is the definition of asleep at the wheel.

And let me say this as a businessman, because the strait is my beat. I know exactly what that waterway is worth. It carries roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil. War-risk insurance that was a rounding error before the war now runs 2% to 6% of a ship’s value — a $6 million toll to move one tanker — and transits have collapsed by as much as 90%. Every dollar of it lands at the American pump and on the American shelf. I have built my career arguing that these everyday costs matter. They do.

But a shipping crisis is a commercial problem. A plot to kill the President is an existential one. Confusing the two — putting a Saturday tanker deadline in the same news cycle, the same breath, the same priority slot as an active assassination threat — is not strategy. It’s a scrambling of first things and last things.

Comparing apples to apples would mean this: the number-one item on every desk in that administration is keeping the President alive. Full stop. The strait, the tolls, the insurance premiums, the oil price — real as they are — come after. Instead we got a weekend ultimatum about a waterway and a president slipping onto the safer plane, and we’re all supposed to nod along as if that adds up.

It doesn’t. One plus one still equals two. Secure the President first. Then, and only then, worry about who opens the strait and when. Anyone treating those as the same equation is either not doing the arithmetic — or asleep at the wheel.