Caroline Polisi is a federal and white collar criminal defense attorney in New York and is of counsel at Pierce Burns LLP. She frequently appears on CNN as a legal analyst and is an anchor at the Law & Crime Network, providing live legal analysis on the country's high profile court cases. Follow her @CarolinePolisi. The views expressed in this commentary are her own.

(CNN) President Trump's predictable response to the domestic abuse accusations against Rob Porter and David Sorensen -- a tweet that read in part, "is there no such thing any longer as Due Process?" — shows his fundamental misunderstanding of this vital element of our legal system. And his tone-deaf refusal to acknowledge the victims of the alleged abuse all but confirms that his defense, at its core, is not of Porter or Sorensen at all, but rather of himself.

Caroline Polisi

President Trump is wrong. People's lives are not being " shattered and destroyed " by a "mere allegation" as he would have us believe.

It is true, however, that we are at a cultural inflection point in which we are choosing to believe the victims more than ever. Yet as a criminal defense attorney, I see firsthand how due process occupies a prominent -- if not central - place in our justice system every day. And I can attest to the fact that the accused's due process rights are alive and well in our justice system. They are thriving, in fact.

In this aftermath of #MeToo, it is critically important to make the distinction between courts of law and courts of public opinion. Trump's conflation of the two by way of a disingenuous appeal to "Due Process" is a commonly used, but ultimately dangerous argument, because it damages our collective understanding of the issues, both legal and otherwise.

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Due process, as set forth in the Fifth and 14th Amendments to the United States Constitution, affords citizens legal procedural safeguards against governmental deprivation of "life, liberty, or property." That's it. It applies to government action, not the news media, or (in the case of say, Roy Moore ) to political races or social media.