Ben Sasse announced on Tuesday that he has terminal stage-four pancreatic cancer. The former Republican senator revealed his diagnosis in a post on X, calling it a “death sentence”.
“Friends – This is a tough note to write, but since a bunch of you have started to suspect something, I’ll cut to the chase: Last week I was diagnosed with metastasized, stage-four pancreatic cancer, and am gonna die,” he wrote.
Sasse, 53, represented Nebraska in the US Senate from 2015 to 2023. In 2021, he was among seven Republicans to vote for impeaching Donald Trump after the January 6 Capitol riot. The Senate vote fell short of the two-thirds majority needed to convict.
The Nebraska-born son of a high school teacher and football coach, Sasse studied at Harvard and Oxford universities before receiving a PhD in history from Yale University.
In a remarkable farewell speech to the Senate before he retired, Sasse decried both the left and right extremes of the political spectrum. Of the left, he said, “Our history is exclusively a story of victimhood and a narrative of oppression. There can be no redemption, no progress, and no hope.”
On the right, he said: “Victimization is a story we trumpet. Demagogues denounce the idea that there could be anything left to conserve in America. According to these zealots, we lost the idea of America long ago, and it is naive to think it could be recovered.”
In his statement on Tuesday, Sasse said: “This is hard for someone wired to work and build, but harder still as a husband and a dad.” Sasse and his wife have three children.
“There’s not a good time to tell your peeps you’re now marching to the beat of a faster drummer – but the season of advent isn’t the worst,” Sasse continued. “As a Christian, the weeks running up to Christmas are a time to orient our hearts toward the hope of what’s to come.”
More than 67,000 Americans are diagnosed with pancreatic cancer annually, with about 51,000 deaths, according to the American Cancer Society.
