This paper outlines how the concept stagecraft emerged as a productive analytic to understand the intricate politics of tourism capitalism, image curation, and rule by appearances during Hosni Mubarak’s presidency. This governance mimicked the logic of the tourism business and the industry’s dependence on appearance, images and imaginaries. Cultural heritage and tourism have long permeated Egyptian nation-building (Colla 2007), but only in the 1990s did tourism become an industry of economic importance on a mass scale: international arrivals went from two million visitors to fifteen;revenues from U.S. $380 million to 6.4 billion. Scholars have analyzed the conditions of this expansion (Hazbun 2007, Steiner 2010). My doctoral research, based on extensive fieldwork with tourist bureaucrats, marketing experts, and tourist workers in 2011-2013, instead turns attention to its effects: What influence did the tourism sector assert on power and statecraft in Egypt during the Mubarak era? What types of politics did it enable? What actions and visions did it foster among state actors and ordinary people? My findings suggest that by 2010, tourism was not only a successful business; it had become an integral mode of a kind of governance that mimicked the logic of the industry itself. The paper details how stagecraft through tourism worked at different levels. The ever-growing bank of romantic and stylized tourist images were employed as a means to promote particular visions of the regime, the nation and its future. The Red Sea resorts and the hosting of high-profile diplomatic meetings in Sharm el-Sheikh staged a liberal, wealthy and beautiful version of the country for Western audiences. Simultaneously, tourism provided opportunities for increased state control in previously peripheral regions (Sinai, the northern coast and the oases). I also show how the tourist gaze became a predominant mode of imagining the nation and ruling the citizens. Images of "touristy Egypt" resonated among the population, because it concretized the country's “potential” beyond present misrule. Tourism awareness campaigns further solicited citizens to curate the image of Egypt in front of the world, displaying certain sides (monuments, the Egyptian Museum and beaches) and hiding others (poverty, misrule and pollution). In 2011, tourism was Egypt’s outward face. The future looked bright. But the revolution would destroy the scene of Mubarak’s stagecraft. But his fall also marked the end of rule by appearance. Since then, audacity, boldness and post-truth have taken over the stage.