Ben Sasse, ex-Republican senator, says he has terminal pancreatic cancer | US Senate
Ben Sasse announced 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 difficult note to write, but since many of you have begun to suspect something, I’ll cut to the chase: Last week I was diagnosed with stage four metastatic pancreatic cancer, and I am going to die,” he wrote.
Sasse, 53, represented Nebraska in the U.S. Senate from 2015 to 2023. In 2021, he was among seven Republicans to vote for the impeachment of Donald Trump after the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol. The Senate vote fell short of the two-thirds majority needed to convict.
Born in Nebraska, the son of a high school teacher and football coach, Sasse studied at Harvard and Oxford universities before receiving a doctorate in history from Yale University.
In a remarkable farewell speech to the Senate before retiring, Sasse denounced the far left and right of the political spectrum. Of the left, he said: “Our story is exclusively a story of victimization and a story of oppression. There can be no redemption, no progress, no hope.”
On the right, he said: “Victimhood is a story we trumpet. Demagogues denounce the idea that there might be anything left to keep in America. According to these fanatics, we lost the idea of America a long time ago, and it is naive to think that it could be reclaimed.”
In his statement Tuesday, Sasse said, “It’s difficult for someone who is willing to work and build, but even more difficult as a husband and father. » Sasse and his wife have three children.
“There’s no good time to tell your friends that you now march to the beat of a faster drummer – but the Advent season isn’t the worst,” Sasse continued. “As a Christian, the weeks leading up to Christmas are a time to set our hearts toward hope for what is to come.”
More than 67,000 Americans are diagnosed with pancreatic cancer each year, with approximately 51,000 deaths, according to the American Cancer Society.
