In its quest to establish “The New Republic” (al-gumhuriyya al-gadida), President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi’s Egyptian regime invests excessive financial and symbolic resources in megaprojects. Whether in the form of roads and bridges, metros and railways, fish farms, enormous housing schemes, or a whole New Administrative Capital built from scratch in the desert, projects (mashari‘) promise employment, growth, increased life quality, and improved national futures. While critical urbanists and development scholars have shown that Egyptian megaprojects are often unrealistic, environmentally wasteful, and rarely delivering according to plan (e.g., Sims 2016), this paper reflects on why megaprojects keep on being announced and executed, despite ostensible failures and waste. To this end, the paper casts Egypt’s recent project extravaganza as Stagecraft: a modality of governance that stages particular visions of the state and the national community so as to make them imaginable and legible, and in the end tangible and realizable. Empirically, the paper brings together two kinds of material. First, it analyzes how the vision of The New Republic gets articulated in social media promotion of infrastructural projects in the New Administrative Capital, with a special focus on the recent construction of the world’s highest flagpole. Second, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork with construction workers and engineers - who built said flagpole - as well as individual entrepreneurs and real estate investors in Badr City. Badr is a long-neglected but recently booming desert city, in which many laborers and engineers who work in the nearby New Capital reside. My material suggests that megaprojects constitute a particularly effective kind of stagecraft in Egypt because the “the project” (al-mashru‘) is an organizational form where the regime’s megalomaniac ambitions and individualized dreams meet. Just as the state stages itself through projects (promoted, planned or actualized), personal future making also tends to be project-shaped. My interlocutors in Badr keep contriving and launching small business projects (taxis, cafés, supermarkets; also called mashari‘) to envision and actualize better versions of themselves: increased social status, economic and social stability. In other words, the project form entices state actors, capitalists, and hustlers alike, rendering dreams of vastly disparate scales structurally similar. Hence, staging an improved world through projects becomes a recognizable pursuit that appeals to broad layers of citizens. The New Republic that materializes among the sands, highways and towers of the New Administrative Capital resonates with many Egyptian men who are themselves projecting better lives in and around Badr City.