Former Senator Sasse announces terminal cancer.

Ben Sasse, who I liked … a lot. Very solid, principled man who tangled with Trump. He is 53 and has stage 4 pancreatic cancer

Ben Sasse, a Republican former senator from Nebraska and a former president of the University of Florida, announced on 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,” Mr. Sasse, 53, wrote in a heartfelt, nearly 700-word-long message on X that cited Scripture.“Last week I was diagnosed with metastasized, stage-four pancreatic cancer, and am gonna die.”

Mr. Sasse was elected to the Senate in 2014 and became a high-profile figure in national politics during Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign and first term, when he personified the ambivalent posture that many conventionally conservative Republicans initially took toward Mr. Trump. He voted consistently with Mr. 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 Mr. Trump and a chorus of allies began contesting Joseph R. Biden’s victory in the days after the 2020 election, Mr. Sasse criticized Senator Josh Hawley, a Republican from Missouri, for embracing Mr. Trump’s false claims that the election had been stolen. …

But as Republicans gradually coalesced around Mr. Trump and his claims, Mr. 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.

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Mr. Sasse, who has degrees from Harvard, St. John’s College and Yale, 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.

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