It was a quiet Tuesday in Washington, DC—or at least it should have been. The usual hum of bureaucrats pretending to work while waiting for their next overpriced latte was interrupted by a flurry of activity that could only be described as panic. The kind of panic that only arises when someone—say, Elon Musk or Donald Trump—decides to pull the rug out from under the comfy, well-funded world of federal employees who, until now, had no idea they were part of a deep state.
The phone calls started coming in like a bad sequel to The Godfather—a phone call every half hour from someone either asking if they should change their name or where to hide their assets. In truth, I didn’t fully understand the situation myself until my cousin, who works in the Department of Housing and Urban Development, sent me a frantic text. It simply read: “Do you know anyone who knows a good Swiss bank?”
Now, I’m not the banking type. The closest I’ve come to financial sophistication is owning a dozen half-price coupons for Chipotle, but I wasn’t about to ignore this cryptic message. “Swiss?,” I texted back. “You mean for skiing?”
“No!” came the reply. “For hiding money!”
Apparently, the Trump-Elon purge wasn’t just an abstract idea being discussed in podcasts and online conspiracies; it was happening. In real time. Bureaucrats were suddenly waking up to the fact that their cushy government jobs had just been vaporized like a balloon in a toddler’s fist. I can’t say I felt too bad for them. After all, what did they think would happen when you spend your entire career crafting policies no one reads while scrolling through TikTok under the desk?
But the real kicker? The immediate spike in Google searches for “Lawyer” and “Swiss Bank Account.” I can practically hear the collective click-clack of keyboards in DC as people scrambled to hide everything they had in the least public way possible. One government employee even reportedly asked their tech-savvy nephew if they could “just change all their money to Bitcoin” to avoid detection.
I heard through the grapevine that several high-ranking officials were showing up to work dressed as accountants, carrying briefcases full of shredded documents and wearing dark sunglasses indoors. Meanwhile, others were quietly deleting their LinkedIn profiles, hoping that no one would notice their entire career trajectory had been based on “working in Federal Compliance for 40 years” without doing much of anything.
On the other hand, Elon Musk—who, if we’re being honest, only became part of this mess because he tweeted something absurd about “cleaning up the swamp”—was enjoying the show from the safety of a Tesla somewhere in the Nevada desert. I’m sure he was basking in the glow of all that Twitter engagement while sipping what I can only assume is an iced matcha latte in a jar.
But it wasn’t just the deep-state types who were panicking. Small business owners—who up until that point had been blissfully unaware of the term “Deep State”—now had a sudden urge to “separate assets” in case their taxes got audited. I overheard one man at a coffee shop the next day telling his friend he had to “set up a shell company in the Caymans” just in case he ever accidentally signed up for government assistance.
In short, Washington, DC was a place on the brink of existential dread, but all wrapped in a neatly pressed suit and a tie that cost more than a month’s rent in Cincinnati. There were whispers of senators fleeing to obscure countries, entire law firms changing their signage to “Offshore Account Services,” and a staggering rise in LinkedIn requests from people who suddenly “knew a guy” in Zurich.
In the end, I don’t know how things will play out. The government might collapse under the weight of its own secrecy, or it might turn out that all the Swiss banks were just waiting for a tax audit to come through. But one thing is certain—if there’s one thing DC loves more than bureaucracy, it’s the sweet, sweet sound of a freshly opened offshore account.
Note: This is a satirical story, not to be taken seriously!