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WASHINGTON — Former Sen. Ben Sasse, who also served as University of Florida president, announced on Tuesday he has been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer.
"This is a tough note to write, but since a bunch of you have started to suspect something, I'll cut to the chase," Sasse, 53, said on social media platform X. "Last week I was diagnosed with metastasized, stage-four pancreatic cancer, and am gonna die."
Sasse, a Christian conservative, represented Nebraska in the U.S. Senate from 2015 to 2023, where he became a prominent critic of President Donald Trump.
He was one of only seven Republicans who voted to convict Trump on a charge of inciting insurrection during a Jan. 6, 2021, speech to supporters just before hundreds of them stormed the U.S. Capitol. A year earlier, Sasse had joined nearly all Republicans in voting to acquit Trump in the president's first impeachment trial.
Sasse, who has degrees from Harvard College, St. John's College and Yale University, left the Senate to become president of the University of Florida in February 2023. He stepped down last year after his wife, Melissa, was diagnosed with epilepsy.
"I'm not going down without a fight," Sasse said in his social media post on Tuesday.
"One sub-part of God's grace is found in the jawdropping advances science has made the past few years in immunotherapy and more. Death and dying aren't the same — the process of dying is still something to be lived."
