But Sanders seems to have found his voice again in recent weeks. In April, he went on a speaking tour with Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez, where he remarked how much smaller the crowds were, compared to the frenzy surrounding his 2016 campaign. But it was a sign that Sanders was ready to be heard on the national stage again.

Then in May, Sanders stepped up his rhetoric, angrily reacting to Republicans' proposed health-care bill, taking his indignation to another level after the release of the Trump administration's proposed budget and the Congressional Budget Office score for the American Health Care Act.

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On Thursday, Sanders went a step further, angrily demanding White House budget director Mick Mulvaney — a former GOP congressman from South Carolina — answer his questions about tax cuts for the wealthy. It's vintage Sanders — talk of “millionaires,” “billionaires” and “the top 1 percent.” It was the kind of talk that made him wildly popular among progressives on the 2016 campaign trail.

“Your budget thinks it is good public policy to provide $52 billion in tax breaks to the wealthiest family in this country — a family already worth $128 billion,” he said. “I want you to tell the American people why you think it is a good idea to give $3 trillion in tax breaks to the top 1 percent, at a time when the rich are becoming much richer, while at the same time you're going to throw 17 million children in this country off of health insurance because of the unconscionable cuts that you are making to Medicaid.”

Mulvaney defended several of Sanders's specific criticisms, saying Meals on Wheels programs won't be cut in the way Sanders suggests, and that cuts to Medicaid are simply a “slower growth rate of Medicaid.”

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That's when the conversation started to devolve into a back-and-forth of seemingly interconnected talking points. But it drifted from repealing the estate tax to health care to entitlement programs and back, with neither Mulvaney nor Sanders willing to concede.