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But “personally, part of what makes it difficult [to accept] is that we were six years into the administration and spent a year and a half of exhaustive negotiations before announcing” the Cuba opening, said Rhodes, who coincidentally spoke at a Cuban entrepreneurship event in Miami on Monday. “They seemed to do this in such a slipshod way. Years of work and painstaking negotiations are countered by what feels like very minimal work and thought.”

Rhodes isn’t the only Obama administration veteran who seems to be experiencing personal pain as Trump strips away portions of the 44th president’s legacy — on immigration, trade, the environment and, perhaps, health care. Ensconced in think tanks in Washington and New York, or in the private sector on both coasts, the Obama alumni network has become a diaspora of the disappointed as Trump tries to make good on his promises to upend much of what they had worked to accomplish.

“I felt short of breath and like there was a dagger in my heart,” said Wendy Cutler, former acting deputy U.S. trade ambassador who spent three years helping negotiate the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership trade accord from which Trump withdrew the United States on his third day in office.

Cutler, now a vice president at the Asia Society, had left USTR on an emotional high one week after she had been among the U.S. delegation in Atlanta in Oct. 2015 when the TPP, the largest regional pact in history, was completed.

On Jan. 23, when Trump held an Oval Office event to announce the U.S. withdrawal, Cutler was in her eighth-floor office in Dupont Circle. She couldn’t bear to watch.

“When I give speeches, a lot of Asian colleagues are stunned,” Cutler said. “Even though they watched the campaign and knew the agreement was in trouble, they cannot come to terms with how quickly this happened.”

Every transfer of the White House between political parties means a sharp shift of policy focus. But the handoff between Obama and Trump has been particularly disorienting, given their polar opposite views of the world and rhetorical means of expressing it.

Obama tried to buck up his staff a day after Trump’s election victory during a speech in the Rose Garden, when he told scores of somber-looking aides, some tearful, to keep their “heads up.” But it has been increasingly difficult.

For Cecilia Muñoz, who spent two decades as a leading immigrant rights advocate before serving as Obama’s White House domestic policy adviser, the Trump wrecking ball followed her to the end of the earth.

After serving eight years in the Obama White House, Muñoz had booked a hiking vacation in New Zealand to begin the day after Obama left office January 20 — traveling as far from the United States as she could get.

Six days after she arrived in New Zealand, however, Trump announced a sweeping travel ban on citizens of seven majority-Muslim countries, sowing chaos at several airports as federal authorities detained dozens of travelers.

“I checked in [on the news] a couple times a day to be aware of what was happening, much to my husband’s dismay,” said Muñoz, now a vice president at the New America think tank. “Then I worked off my feelings on the hikes.”