Ben Sasse Says He Has Terminal Pancreatic Cancer

Ben Sasse, a Republican former senator from Nebraska and a former president of the University of Florida, announced Tuesday that he had received a diagnosis of terminal Stage 4 pancreatic cancer.

“Since a bunch of you have started to suspect something, I’ll cut to the chase,” Sasse, 53, wrote in a heartfelt, nearly 700-word-long message on social platform X that cited Scripture.

“Last week I was diagnosed with metastasized, stage-four pancreatic cancer, and am gonna die.”

Sasse, who served in the Senate from 2015 to 2023, was one of few Republicans who broke with President Donald Trump in his false claims of election fraud. He resigned from the Senate two years into his second term and then held a brief but turbulent tenure as president of the University of Florida.

Sasse was elected to the Senate in 2014 and became a high-profile figure in national politics during Trump’s 2016 campaign and first term, when he personified the ambivalent posture that many conventionally conservative Republicans initially took toward Trump. He voted consistently with Trump in the Senate even as he regularly took him to task for the tone of his social-media postings and his coziness with autocrats abroad.

As Trump and a chorus of allies began contesting Joe Biden’s victory in the days after the 2020 presidential election, Sasse criticized Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., for embracing Trump’s false claims that the election had been stolen. Sasse was one of seven Senate Republicans who voted to convict Trump following the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol, and he continued to decry his party’s drift toward becoming “the party of conspiracy theories.”

But as Republicans gradually coalesced around Trump and his claims, Sasse — who remained hawkish on foreign policy and staunchly conservative on social issues — appeared increasingly out of step with his party, and he left his Senate seat two years into his second term in 2023.

In his farewell address, he lamented what he called the decline of the Senate.

“Each of us knows that this institution doesn’t work very well right now,” he said. “Each of us knows we should be taking a look in the mirror and acknowledging that lives lived in a politicized echo chamber are unworthy of a place that calls itself a deliberative body, let alone the world’s greatest deliberative body.”

In February 2023, Sasse became a college president for the second time, joining the University of Florida on a $10 million, five-year contract.

Reputed to be a “turnaround artist” for remaking tiny Midland University in Fremont, Nebraska, Sasse had articulated grand visions for education, generally, promoting the idea that students could learn outside the classroom.

But he quickly ran afoul of the University of Florida’s board, which had long embraced a plan to gain a spot as one of the nation’s top five public universities in rankings released by U.S. News & World Report. Sasse publicly questioned the value of the rankings, suggesting that the pursuit of rankings should not be the university’s North Star.

His expenditures in office also raised questions. He hired former Senate aides at high salaries, permitting some of them to commute to their jobs in Gainesville, Florida, from Washington. Sasse was also criticized for not clearly establishing a plan for the university.

In July 2024, he abruptly resigned his post, citing his wife’s failing health. Under the terms of his contract, he remained at the University of Florida as a faculty member in the university’s Hamilton School, which emphasizes classical and civic education. His pay package was set at $1 million a year. This month, the American Enterprise Institute, a prominent conservative-leaning think tank, named Sasse a nonresident senior fellow.

Sasse, who has degrees from Harvard University, St. John’s College and Yale University, has three children. His daughter Corrie was commissioned into the Air Force earlier this year and attends flight school, he wrote. Another daughter, Alex, graduated from college last week, and his son, Breck, is in high school, he said.

“This is hard for someone wired to work and build, but harder still as a husband and a dad,” Sasse wrote on X.

He also wrote that he was “not going down without a fight,” adding that he was optimistic about medical advances in recent years.

“Death and dying aren’t the same — the process of dying is still something to be lived.”