There's a growing appetite for impeachment in the US: AFP/Getty

More Americans want to impeach Donald Trump than approve of his job performance, a new poll says.

The number of American voters who want Congress to impeach the president has risen to 43 percent, up from 38 percent last week, according to a new Politico/Morning Consult poll. Many of the voters said that they want to see those proceedings even if Mr Trump hasn’t committed the “high crimes and misdemeanours” that the Constitution requires.

“If President Trump was hoping his foreign trip would shift the conversation away from scandals, he may be out of luck,” Kyle Dropp, Morning Consult’s co-founder and chief research officer, said. “Over the last week, support for beginning impeachment proceedings among voters rose from 38 percent to 43 percent.”

Mr Trump drew record-low approval ratings during his first 100 days in office, and things haven’t gotten much better since. Just 41 percent of Americans now approve of his performance. That’s compared to the 65 percent job approval his predecessor Barack Obama enjoyed at roughly the same time during his tenure eight years ago, and the 53 percent historical average of presidents dating back to 1938, according to Gallup.

Calls for impeachment have stemmed from alleged contacts between his 2016 campaign and Russian officials, and members of Congress as well as intelligence officials have expressed concern that members of the Trump campaign may have knowingly or unknowingly colluded with Russians in their effort to influence the outcome of the 2016 election.

Following the 2016 election, Mr Obama’s administration imposed sanctions on Russia for meddling in the election. Several high level Trump administration staffers have been impacted by the allegations, including former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, who was forced to resign less than a month into the Trump presidency for having contacts with Russians. Recently, Mr Trump’s son-in-law and senior White House adviser Jared Kushner has been named as a person of interest in a probe into Russian meddling being conducted by a special counsel appointed by the Justice Department and led by former FBI Director Robert Mueller.

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