Senior Democrats on Sunday began talking openly about the imprisonment or impeachment of Donald Trump amid fresh allegations linking the President to hush money paid to two women ahead of the 2016 election.

The result is a growing sense of crisis as Republicans begin to weigh their chances of political survival.

Steve Bannon, the former Trump strategist, said 2019 was shaping up to be a year of “siege warfare”.

“The Democrats are going to weaponise the Mueller report and the president needs a team that can go to the mattresses,” he told The Washington Post.

“The president can’t trust the GOP to be there when it counts . . . They don’t feel any sense of duty or responsibility to stand with Trump.”

The latest twist came in new court documents that said Michael Cohen, the President’s former lawyer, had acted at the direction of his employer in arranging the payments.

“They would be impeachable offences. Whether they’re important enough to justify an impeachment is a different question,” Jerry Nadler, a Democratic Congressman from New York, said on CNN's State of the Union.