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The Whole Story with Anderson Cooper
Ben Sasse is Going Home, Lessons on Life and Death. Aired 8-9p ET
Aired July 26, 2026 - 20:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
[20:00:00]
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SASSE: -- broken, this world is broken. Things are not as they should be. So to your direct question, no, I don't, I don't doubt it.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
TAPPER: Spending time with Ben Sasse and his family, hearing their story, it really left a lasting impression. It makes you reflect on your own faith, on what matters most, how you might choose to spend your time if faced with a similar diagnosis, Erica. It's the kind of conversation that stays with you long after the cameras stopped rolling.
HILL: Yes. It certainly will. Jake, appreciate it.
Thanks to all of you for joining me tonight. I'm Erica Hill. Stay tuned, "THE WHOLE STORY" starts right now.
ANDERSON COOPER, CNN ANCHOR: I'm Anderson Cooper. Welcome to THE WHOLE STORY.
Most of you know Ben Sasse as the former senator from Nebraska. He's a lifelong conservative Republican known for his Christian faith as well as his politics. He was a critic of Donald Trump and one of seven Republican senators who voted to impeach him. He left office in the middle of his second term in 2023 to become the president of the University of Florida. He said one reason he left politics was he didn't have enough time at home with his wife and three kids.
But time is even more precious now to him and his family. Last December, he was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer. Doctors gave him just months to live, but he's defied all expectations after starting an experimental treatment that's extending his life, giving him perhaps another year to live.
CNN's Jake Tapper has known Ben Sasse for years, and in this next hour, he sits down with Ben and his wife, Melissa. They tell Jake about the day-to-day reality of living with cancer, and how their faith and even their sense of humor is helping their family cope. He also talks openly about the time he has left and just how he intends to live it.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
JAKE TAPPER, CNN ANCHOR (voice-over): The College World Series of baseball. It attracts hundreds of thousands of fans every year to Omaha.
Nebraska native Ben Sasse is one of them.
BEN SASSE, FORMER U.S. SENATOR: Yes, I mean, this fixes everything.
TAPPER: Oh, this is good. Yes, there's something about a good baseball game on a beautiful day.
SASSE: Yes. This place, this is field of dreams.
TAPPER: It's pretty incredible.
SASSE: I've done ground crew work here.
TAPPER: Really?
SASSE: Earlier years in the Senate, I would do this with these guys in the game.
TAPPER: I know that you have good days and bad days, good moments and bad moments. How is today? How is right now?
SASSE: Now it's pretty good. And I'm on a super dose of chemo and it's beating the hell out of me. And it's beating the hell out of the tumors. It's a trade I'll take.
TAPPER: And how -- is it physically demanding to be here, standing in the heat like now?
SASSE: No, it's just a matter of managing the nausea waves and the bleeding. I bleed a lot out of my scalp. I can't grow a lot of skin. So I got a whole bunch of medical bandages and bloody mess underneath this. And you just change your wrappings so much time today. I joke with my dermatological oncology team at MD Anderson. They're all -- I'm covered in a rash. Like, I can't -- because I can't grow skin. My torso is all super nasty.
And when I'm in the hospital, they don't see me every time. But most of the times I want to see it, and they want me to take all my clothes off. And I'm like, lady, I used to be fit.
TAPPER (voice-over): Here's something I should prepare you for. Ben makes a lot of jokes about cancer and about dying. It's his way of dealing with the heaviness of his diagnosis. And the joking began the very moment we first saw each other hours earlier.
It's good to see you.
SASSE: Good to see you. Thanks.
TAPPER: You look good.
SASSE: I don't know about that.
TAPPER: Senator Sasse, it's been a long time. Thanks.
(Voice-over): I've known Ben Sasse for more than a decade, having interviewed him many times over the years. And as you can see, cancer has certainly taken its toll physically on him.
SASSE: I have a great hospice doc who told me early on, she goes, when you're dying of an abdominal disease, you got an algorithm of four variables. You got, pain from tumors, you got nausea from drugs and tumors, you got a constipation to diarrhea continuum, and you got an energy fatigue dimension. And she said, any of those problems, if you tell your doc you have a problem, they'll say there's a drug for that and there's definitely a drug for that. And it might screw up the other three. So you got to manage the algorithm and so --
TAPPER: So you're like an alchemist now?
SASSE: Yes, I'm a druggie. But I definitely would prefer to have more energy and less fatigue. And I'm willing to endure more puking and more pain to be alive. So I do less drugs than would be normal for the amount of cancer I have.
[20:05:01]
TAPPER: And you, in order just to do this interview, you have to modify your drug regimen. Right?
SASSE: I toned down my morphine a lot, otherwise I'd be giggling all the time.
TAPPER: Does that mean you're in pain? So you're in pain right now?
SASSE: A little, but not it's not terrible.
TAPPER (voice-over): The pain started in the fall of 2025.
SASSE: I did sprint triathlons and I was training for a sprint triathlon. I would bike with a 45 pound vest on at the beginning, which is just incredibly stupid posture to have your back at this angle.
(CROSSTALK)
TAPPER: It doesn't really make sense.
SASSE: Riding a bike it makes no sense.
TAPPER: Right.
SASSE: And I never deliberated on it. I just started doing it, and then all of a sudden I ended up with all this abdominal pain and all this back pain. And for about two weeks, I just assumed I had pulled a bunch of muscles from wearing the vest.
TAPPER: Sure, you're over 50. SASSE: Yes, yes.
TAPPER: Yes.
SASSE: So then, said, no, there's something wrong here. And I went into my doc. He did a bunch of tests and nothing came back. And so he wanted to refer me to a GI specialist, and I'm like, I'm not, you know, I'm not the toughest guy in the world. But I grew up working on the farm, and I'm pretty sure this isn't celiac or lactose intolerance. Like the pain I'm dealing with is something really is wrong.
And I pushed him and he said, why don't we go do a full body scan? And that was mid-December. And he called me back 45 minutes after I left the CT machines and said, we got to have a talk. He was being real delicate, and at one point he starts talking about, you know, oncology care is so much better than it used to be. And I'm like, dude, you've never told me I have cancer, and you're telling me that oncology care isn't that scary anymore?
Man up. Like, give me a hard fact. And he said, I'm driving. I'm going to pull over. And he confirmed that I wasn't driving at this time. And he said, I'll give you a hard fact. Ben Sasse's tumor -- torso is chock full of tumors. like that. That's real.
TAPPER: That sounds like it means we can't do anything about -- like we can't operate, like it's too much to operate. Right?
SASSE: Yes. So they said, you know, probably three to four months to live. And --
TAPPER: This is in December.
SASSE: This is mid-December.
TAPPER: Wow. And what is the reaction when you hear something like that?
SASSE: I felt the heaviness of death being terrible and obviously not wanting your wife to go through being widowed or your kids to be orphaned, to lose their dad. But I just felt at peace that death is real. I've always known we're all on the clock, and to get a finite number felt horrible, but not surprising.
TAPPER: Your faith is -- it always has been remarkable, but never more so I think as somebody who's long admired and covered you during this period. Just your supreme confidence in what happens next and that you will see your loved ones again. And do you ever have any moments of doubt about any of it?
I mean, let me just say, I envy you. I wish I felt that way. I think there are a lot of people probably watching who think, God, what a gift.
SASSE: I think death is wicked. But I don't think it's a surprise to any of us who reckon hard with a conscience that says we're broken. This world is broken. Things are not as they should be. So to your direct question, no, I don't, I don't doubt it.
TAPPER: You're, but I imagine selflessly, you are sad for the people who love you, even if you're confident you're going to a better place and that you will see them again.
SASSE: Yes.
TAPPER: There is that pain that you already acknowledged.
SASSE: A hundred percent. My wife and I've been married 31 years and have been, you know, good friends for a year and a half, two years longer than that. I am sad for what she'll experience during that period of grieving and transition. She's a rock, and so I'm not scared for her, but I'm sad for her. When I think about my three kids, my oldest daughter is about to turn 25. Middle kid is 22. We are blessed that they are rooted and strong.
And, you know, this has been heavy, but they're fine. I don't mean they don't whitewash it, but they're going to be fine. My son just turned 15, and he seems to be doing great, but I feel like a 15-year- old boy could fake it even if it wasn't. but --
TAPPER: Sure. That's the whole gig.
SASSE: Yes, yes. I feel heaviest for him. I don't doubt the providence of this that it'll be fine, but I'm definitely sad that, you know, who knows when, he's without a dad too young.
[20:10:03]
TAPPER: Hey, Breck, Jake Tapper.
(Voice-over): This is Ben's son Breck, back at the ballpark together. They've attended the College World Series for Breck's entire life. They're giving each other a hard time, just like most teens and their dads. This time, it's about Ben's taste in music.
BRECK SASSE, BEN'S SON: You know, we're different.
TAPPER: Why? What is -- how is he different?
B. SASSE: I don't know, he's just like, if Lady Gaga comes on in the car, he won't change it.
TAPPER: She's pretty talented.
SASSE: That's not true.
TAPPER: She's pretty talented. I mean, like --
SASSE: We're going to find out.
TAPPER (voice-over): I was reluctant to ask Breck about the fact that his dad is dying. I can't imagine being that dad or that boy, but Ben said it was OK to ask.
So just, it must be pretty special coming to this with your dad today.
B. SASSE: Definitely. Yes.
TAPPER: Just given the challenges he's facing and the way he's facing them.
B. SASSE: Yes. It's -- I love coming out here. This is all I would say this place for me to hang out to.
TAPPER: He seems like a pretty great dad.
B. SASSE: Most of the time.
TAPPER: Most of the time? Most of the time? All right. Most of the most of the time. Thanks, Breck. I appreciate it.
B. SASSE: Nice to meet you.
MELISSA SASSE, BEN'S WIFE: For better or for worse has come true.
TAPPER (voice-over): Coming up, another story to tell. An exclusive talk with Ben's wife, Melissa.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
TAPPER: You don't do a lot of interviews, and I think you haven't done any since Ben's diagnosis. Right? I'm so honored that you're doing it with me. But why, why are you doing it?
M. SASSE: I don't like a lot of attention or being out in the forefront, but I just wanted people to know how I was doing and that I support him and that we're on the same page about our theology and what's going on in our lives. So I wanted to be here with you, and I trust you. So.
TAPPER: And I appreciate that.
M. SASSE: Sure.
TAPPER: What do you hope you've said that you didn't -- I'm paraphrasing here, but that you never had any intention to die so publicly. What do you hope people get from this?
SASSE: We all have a death sentence. It isn't just somebody with pancreatic cancer that's metastasized. We're all under a death sentence. So tell the truth about that. It seems like a way to love your neighbor. And as a Christian, the opportunity to give an account for the hope that you have is a blessing. So tell them the truth.
TAPPER (voice-over): And it's also Melissa's truth to share because as unimaginable as this is for Ben, the cancer is also stealing him from her.
[20:15:02]
When Ben first complained about pain, she knew right away something was wrong.
M. SASSE: You were explaining this pain to me all the time. He never complains, like rarely about anything. And especially not about a pain. So I was like, you need to go to the doctor. He just went to the doctor, and I said, you need to go to the doctor. So he called the doctor and the doctor said, you need to take more fiber.
TAPPER: Oh, God.
M. SASSE: He's getting on all these fiber capsules.
TAPPER: Oh, geez.
M. SASSE: I'm making all these things with fiber. Fiber. Metamucil. The whole cabinets are filled with every kind of fiber.
TAPPER: Oh, my goodness.
SASSE: Again, mistakes were made.
M. SASSE: And after that things were not going well. And so finally, he agreed to go see the doctor.
TAPPER: When the bad news finally came, when the doctor called him and he said, Ben Sasse has a torso full of tumors, how did that information get to you?
M. SASSE: We hugged. We cried for maybe five or 10 minutes. We prayed. We said, Lord, we trust you. I mean, boom, that's all it was. And then we said Alex is graduating tomorrow. We need to handle this. How are we going to -- we can't mess up her graduation. Let's wait until after to tell her.
SASSE: So to clarify, the part about hugging, crying and believing to live is Christ, to die is gain, and being OK with it within the hour, that's all true. We also resolved to not tell our middle kid. We were going to tell our oldest kid right away, and not tell our middle kid because she was graduating from college the next day.
TAPPER: Right.
SASSE: Mom decides that it would be totally fine to just sob and bawl constantly for the next three or four hours and try to fib to the middle kid that this is because of how proud I am of you to be graduating.
M. SASSE: No, no, no. I got through that day.
SASSE: No, you didn't.
M. SASSE: It was the next morning when I was steaming her gown that was a little emotional.
SASSE: A little?
M. SASSE: I mean, I hid it behind the gown while I was steaming it. And she came in and asked me about it, and that's when I said --
SASSE: And nobody -- yes.
M. SASSE: I'm very emotional about you graduating.
SASSE: So excited for you graduating early.
M. SASSE: And she said, you don't get that emotional.
SASSE: She said -- she turned to and goes, does Dad have cancer?
TAPPER: Seriously?
M. SASSE: Yes, because we've been --
SASSE: I mean, I had a rough six or seven weeks.
TAPPER: Right. Right.
SASSE: And mom is now just sobbing while steaming a graduation gown and saying, I'm just so proud of you. She's like BS.
TAPPER: And she's not buying it at all.
M. SASSE: I'm not that emotional about things like that.
TAPPER: Nobody really is.
M. SASSE: I'm a nice mom, but I'm not that nice.
TAPPER: And how did the oldest take it?
SASSE: She was --
M. SASSE: She did pretty well.
SASSE: Yes. She's got a rooted worldview, and she loves her dad, but she believes God has a plan. And she was -- she was tough. She was telling you to make sure you didn't cry in front of her sister.
M. SASSE: Yes.
TAPPER: And then -- and not to, I mean, it's horrible for everybody, but those two are out of college.
SASSE: Ten years older than --
TAPPER: In their 20s.
SASSE: Yes.
TAPPER: You -- Breck obviously was 14 at the time, now 15, telling him must have been, I can't imagine what was that.
M. SASSE: He actually took it pretty hard. He cried and he's like no, no. SASSE: He wanted to ask lots of questions. We didn't want to tell him
the doctor's words that we probably only had three months or so to live. We didn't want to tell him that right away. And he pushed. He wanted to know those kinds of facts right away. So that was a little harder.
TAPPER: Not to really upset you than not the Breck of it all, maybe more than anything, it looks like. Yes.
M. SASSE: Yes. I mean, because he's younger and so.
TAPPER: Do you ever think about what it's going to be like when he's gone?
M. SASSE: Sure. Yes. I mean, what does life look like? Your son not having a father. It's sad for my son not to have a dad. And kind of where I'll be long term with that.
TAPPER (voice-over): This isn't the first time the Sasses have had to deal with crisis. 20 years ago when Melissa was 37, she faced her own physical trauma. They were living in Washington, D.C.. Ben worked for the administration of George W. Bush.
GEORGE W. BUSH, FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT: Our cause in the world is right. And tonight, that cause goes on. God bless.
SASSE: I had written a couple paragraphs on the State of the Union in December '06 for January '07. So we were at the White House after that.
M. SASSE: And we are leaving the event. I started getting weird headache and hearing heavy metal music. I told my three and 5-year-old girls, I need to sit down for a minute. Seems right in the snow and across the street sat down. Thankfully, a woman was going by on the bike and stopped to help them, called an ambulance that just happened to be coming by.
TAPPER: Oh, my god.
[20:20:08]
M. SASSE: And the Secret Service was still around. They took custody of my children. I had a -- or an aneurysm or severe aneurysm in my neck.
SASSE: And at first, we thought she wasn't going to make it because she ended up with three strokes.
TAPPER (voice-over): Ben juggled taking care of their two young daughters while also taking care of his wife.
M. SASSE: I mean, he literally had to get behind me in the hospital bed and kind of move my arms when the girls would come in to make me seem normal. I was exhausted. So I think they say having a stroke is like your brain running a marathon and you're just exhausted.
TAPPER: How much did this prepare you for what you're going through?
SASSE: It definitely shattered our sense that we are in control. For a year and a half, she was postictal. Wasn't --
M. SASSE: It's your favorite word.
TAPPER: What's the word?
M. SASSE: Postictal.
SASSE: Postictal.
M. SASSE: He loves saying that.
SASSE: Ictal is a brain injury and postictal is the kind of drunk hangover effect of something like --
TAPPER: He loves -- he's such a professor.
(Voice-over): Doctors said it would take three years, if ever, for Melissa to fully regain function. With Ben by her side, it only took six months. She credits their togetherness and shared faith for her fast recovery, a shared faith which first brought them together on a Christian mission during college.
M. SASSE: I admired him for just his tenacity and we would play sports with the kids, and I just enjoyed watching him tutor young kids and see them grow.
SASSE: Yes, just she's always been wonderfully self-forgetful, figuring out how to pour herself out for other people. And then that summer, I saw this girl from Alabama. All of our confusion about sports loyalties notwithstanding.
M. SASSE: At times.
SASSE: Pretty powerful. Sometimes.
M. SASSE: That's right.
TAPPER: Do you guys feud a lot about sports, or are you still an Alabama fan?
M. SASSE: I am an Alabama fan, but I've been in Nebraska a long time. And --
SASSE: Let's be honest, she roots for whichever team has a human interest story of somebody's mom dying on the pregame. Like she'll change her loyalties all the time.
M. SASSE: He does not allow to watch pregame shows. I'm a sucker for the sad story. So Alabama was playing, who was that, Clemson? The quarterback's mother had tongue cancer and lost her tongue.
TAPPER: Oh, man.
M. SASSE: And was talking about her son when he --
SASSE: Which isn't funny.
M. SASSE: It's not.
SASSE: But somehow it's funny when your wife switches loyalties for the game against her own team.
M. SASSE: Alabama has enough national championships. That boy --
SASSE: I'm telling that --
M. SASSE: -- quarterback needed to win that game for his mother.
TAPPER (voice-over): There's that Sasse humor again, clearly present to help Melissa and maybe all of us feel at ease.
Life's change of plans is nothing new for the Sasses. Ben runs for the Senate. When we come back.
SASSE: Hey, I'm Ben Sasse, candidate for Senate. Nice to meet you.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Nice to meet you.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[20:27:57]
TAPPER (voice-over): This is Midland University, a private Lutheran college in Fremont, Nebraska. The small town outside Omaha where Ben Sasse grew up.
SASSE: My grandpa came back from World War II and worked at this little college, and over the course of 33 years, worked his way up. So I grew up -- I grew up on this campus.
TAPPER (voice-over): It would be a true homecoming for Ben in 2009, when he was named university president. After Melissa's health crisis, Fremont was the perfect place to settle, after years of travel working for the Bush administration and for high powered consulting firms.
I heard you say recently that you have this box in your closet of hotel keys.
SASSE: Yes, you're doing box like this. It's like this.
TAPPER: It's like this. And it's and it's --
SASSE: It's embarrassing.
TAPPER: And you look at it kind of like forlornly.
SASSE: Yes. I have serious regret about how much I traveled. I would just come back from all my trips and take all the hotel keys and throw them on the floor of a closet in my home office. And all of a sudden, it became thousands and thousands of keys. You know, like, that's a hell of a lot of missed dinners.
TAPPER: Is that part of why you started teaching and started entering the academic world?
SASSE: Yes. The fact that there's a campus means that work at home can be pretty tightly connected.
TAPPER (voice-over): Education has always been important to Ben. Midland would be his first opportunity to shape higher education.
SASSE: I built a really good team, and our team had been helping this place, and we had tripled enrollment at the college over three years. And then the alumni of the school, this social media campaign, Facebook thing started "Draft Sasse for Senate."
TAPPER (voice-over): But running for office was not part of Melissa's plan.
M. SASSE: He had an interest in politics because his major was gov. But it was more academia. Yes.
TAPPER: And what about when the -- when there was this "Draft Sasse" movement on Facebook? What did you think about all that?
SASSE: She loved living on the campaign bus like that when the kids were 12, 10 and 2, and we decided to spend 16 months living on and off the Benebago, she loved that the toilet would freeze up on the bus, and we'd be in western Nebraska in January. Dude, it's a way to make yourself popular with --
(CROSSTALK)
TAPPER: Was it horrible or was it fun, or both?
M. SASSE: I'll say both. I don't know what year this campaign bus was, but it was old, man.
SASSE: 1937. I think.
M. SASSE: It had a toilet, but it was not really a working toilet. And I was potty training my son, so that's helpful. The campaign, as grueling as it was, 93 counties. We went to all of them.
SASSE: Four times.
TAPPER: And you won all of them, right?
M. SASSE: All but one.
SASSE: First race we went 92 and one. Then we won them all.
WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: In Nebraska, the Republican Ben Sasse, he will defeat Dave Domino.
JOE BIDEN, FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT: Do you solemnly swear that --
TAPPER (voice-over): Senator Sasse was sworn in on January 3rd, 2015.
I don't know if you remember, but, so you didn't give any interviews, even though everybody wanted to talk to you because you seemed like such an interesting, fresh face.
SASSE: Because it was a long tradition that freshmen didn't speak for a year. And it wasn't clear to me that people talking early and often was a better tradition than the old tradition of you should learn for a while and keep your mouth shut and work hard.
TAPPER (voice-over): Sasse has described that year as a time to learn the ropes. The fun of campaigning was quickly replaced by the reality of legislating.
SASSE: I didn't have a plan for the fact that I don't want to raise my kids in Washington, D.C.. And yet I don't like the idea of being gone all weeknights, and so I didn't think it through enough.
TAPPER: And it's also what you spent your time doing and the Senate that was also a problem when it came to thinking about how much you missed your family. Right?
SASSE: Yes, I mean, I want to say it delicately, because I've been too harsh about the Senate sometimes and how I say it. On weeks when 40 percent of my hours would go to intel and national security stuff, I would think it was often worth it to go through some of the costs at home. But on weeks when intel would only be 10 percent or 15 percent, then I was like, most of the rest of this stuff is theater.
Like, I want to be clear. Lots of good and well-meaning people in the Senate, but it's not an institution that works. And there are lots and lots of people who want to pretend that being a senator is really cool, and it's a great title, and you're powerful. And that doesn't mean we're doing enough work for the American people. And then when you're missing dinner with your kids and you realize, and it's like, I would look at my kids and I felt like they had a chain around their neck with an hourglass.
And I was watching the years, the months or the years or the dinners we had left as a family, and I'd look at my kids and I'd see the sand through the hourglass, like, what the hell was I doing instead of being with you?
M. SASSE: It was tough with him being away all week. But there were wonderful things about the Senate, too. I mean, our daughter got to give tours of the Capitol at age 12. They got to see this whole world. We helped get people out of Afghanistan when it was falling, and they were meeting North Korean defectors who had made it out. They're just seeing how our country works.
SASSE: Thank you, Mr. President. I rise to speak from the floor for the first time today.
TAPPER (voice-over): Tough things that Sasse was brutally honest about when he finally stepped to the microphone on the House floor in November 2015. SASSE: The people despise us all. And why is this? Because we're not
doing our job. We're not doing the primary things that the people sent us here to do.
TAPPER: You gave your floor speech, which was very moving and powerful. You came on my show. It was very clear that, like, you had a really interesting perspective on things in the sense that you had perspective.
SASSE: And so I think that if the republic survives and I think, you know, I'm -- I would go long on America. I'd bet on America. But if the republic survives 15 to 30 years from now, it will have survived because we figured out how to have serious discussions in the midst of ubiquitous information and social media. I think we'll have to find a way to reform the fact that there are millions and millions of voices, 340 million personation, but there are millions of voices, and the people who are the loudest and the people who get the most share are not at all representative.
They're way angrier than regular people, and they're way more politically addicted than regular people. And I think the normies have to get some voice back if the republic survives. And that's some of what I was aiming at in 2014 to '15, was to go slow and listen a little while, because the ubiquity of cameras have made hearings almost all B.S. I mean, almost every hearing is theater nonsense. It's not serious deliberation. We don't do real stuff in the Congress very often.
TAPPER (voice-over): And while Ben Sasse spends his first year in the Senate mostly listening and learning, his second year would bring a major disruption to his party with the election of Donald Trump, and that's when Sasse really finds his voice.
[20:35:02]
SASSE: I think it's a reality TV show for him, and our country deserves better than this.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
SEN. TED CRUZ (R-TX): We are going to beat Hillary Clinton. And America will be back.
TAPPER: Everything is on the line for Republicans tomorrow. And if the polls are to be believed, we'll be talking about Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.
[20:40:03]
(Voice-over): It was the end of February 2016, Super Tuesday, during one of the most consequential presidential elections in recent history.
COOPER: Donald Trump leading by an eye-popping 33 percentage points.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The Republican Party is now in full on panic mode.
TAPPER (voice-over): The stakes were high for the Republicans, and no one knew that better than freshman Republican Senator Ben Sasse.
SASSE: This country is in crisis, and I think he thinks that almost all of it is a game. I think it's a reality TV show for him.
TAPPER (voice-over): Sasse would be one of the first Republican senators to speak out against then candidate Donald Trump, and later President Trump.
SASSE: Given what we know about Donald Trump, I can't vote for that guy either.
I am skeptical of power, and I love the U.S. Constitution. I mean, it's just -- it's the greatest political document in the history of the world. We shouldn't want anybody in power ever that talks about it like an individual could fix it all, or could organize our lives, or could be the supreme center of our consciousness. And so we should want a constitutional system that is skeptical of anybody who talks about power, like it's great.
I want Nebraskans and Americans across 50 states to have the power in their neighborhoods. And so I'm skeptical of centralization of power, and I'm anxious about anybody who talks like it's awesome if they had more power.
TAPPER: You were one of seven Republicans to vote to convict after January 6th, and you gave a very brave and bold statement about what happened on January 6th. Was that a tough vote? And do you -- when you look back on it, what do you think?
SASSE: It was consequential and that you had to explain to people you love who might not understand the vote, but it wasn't a tough vote in terms of, you know, I had to vote that somebody was guilty because he was guilty. You know, when you were in the chamber and there are people who've been riled up, who are marching around chanting hang Mike Pence, hang Mike Pence, hang Mike Pence, and some of them have weapons, I don't know how anybody could possibly say, oh, I'm for back the blue and I'm also for these hooligans who said, let's attack cops and kill the vice president for fulfilling his constitutional duty. It wasn't a tough vote.
TAPPER (voice-over): Nor a surprising one. Sasse condemned the insurrection from the Senate floor just hours after it ended.
SASSE: What happened today isn't what America is.
TAPPER (voice-over): And like so many other Republicans, Sasse blamed President Trump's rhetoric for the attack, something Trump denies.
SASSE: I believe the president has disregarded his oath of office. He swore an oath to the American people to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution. He acted against that. What he did was wicked.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Mr. Sasse. SASSE: Guilty.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Mr. Sasse. Guilty.
TAPPER (voice-over): That impeachment vote was not popular with Trump nor with Nebraska's Republican leadership, who had already grown weary of Ben's vocal opposition to the president.
And despite that, when you were reelected, you won 75 percent of the vote, I think?
SASSE: Yes, but pisses me off because my goal was 76 and we literally --
TAPPER: Why was your goal 76?
SASSE: Because of some historic markers in some of the counties. And 76 was my goal. And we landed at 75. Anyway, enough. We've all got limited time left. Why wouldn't I nurture a pet grievance?
TAPPER: You're allowed that one. But in any case, you won more votes than Donald Trump in Nebraska. So even though you were censured by local Republican parties, you were more popular than him.
SASSE: I think the Nebraskans have been really, really good to my family and me.
TAPPER: How tough was it for you when Ben would be attacked?
SASSE: She loved it.
TAPPER: Not --
SASSE: She'd be like, let me tell you more stuff.
M. SASSE: Yes.
SASSE: I got some dirt on this troublemaker.
TAPPER: Not just by President Trump or the Republican Party of Nebraska, but also, you know, conservative citizens, MAGA citizens. And I wonder how tough it was for you because specifically what they were attacking him for was all this stuff that was integral to who Ben is. Adherence to the Constitution, living his Christian theology, civility, standing up for what's right. I mean, they weren't going after him for the kinds of things that politicians usually get attacked for. They were attacking him for being bad in the best possible way. Was that tough?
M. SASSE: Sure. I mean, you want to protect your husband, and I actually don't mind being attacked for things that are true. The lying in politics is what's incredibly difficult for me.
[20:45:04]
And like you said, if you're attacking him for true things, I'll give you a longer list if you like.
TAPPER: Right.
M. SASSE: But, yes, I mean, we are conservatives. We believe in limited government and free speech, and those are dear to us. And so, as things have changed, it has been tough. And I want to convince people, I'm like, come on, this is what we're about.
TAPPER (voice-over): Ben lived his faith as a conservative and intellect and a Cornhusker fan. A family man, a local boy makes good. He seemed the real deal.
DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Your state is very poorly represented by a grandstanding, little respected senator called Little Ben Sasse. He's bad, though, who's an embarrassment.
TAPPER (voice-over): And he was one of the few elected officials.
SASSE: I do.
MIKE PENCE, FORMER U.S. VICE PRESIDENT: Congratulations, Senator.
TAPPER (voice-over): He was able to win an election against a Trump loyalist in the primary. But despite Ben Sasse's popularity in his home state, Sasse became impatient with the slow pace of change in Congress.
SASSE: Mr. President, I rise to speak from this floor for the last time.
TAPPER (voice-over): And he made a decision halfway through his second term that caught the political world off guard.
SASSE: Washington is a place to do a good bit of neighbor loving work, but then to go back home.
TAPPER: Then you left.
SASSE: Announced in '22. Left in '23.
TAPPER: To go run the University of Florida. Huge school, important school. And when you left, it was because you thought the Senate is not where the action is. It's educating people, educating young people.
SASSE: I love the Senate. I believe in what the Senate was built to be and what it can become again. When I left, it was obvious that we weren't going to do meaningful work for the next couple of years. And I think that that's been borne out. Higher education is an important sector, but not nearly as important as whatever will come next. We need new institutions to help 15 to 25-year-olds navigate into the world that's coming. And what's obvious now is that you're not going to keep the same job three decades into the future. You need to be trained to get retrained over and over and over again at 35, 45, and 55. And there's never been a civilization of lifelong learners before. And we have to build that now. TAPPER (voice-over): Coming up, the miracle drug that is giving Ben
time to do just that.
SASSE: Pancreatic cancer has been thought to be undruggable.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[20:51:53]
TAPPER (voice-over): This is the cemetery that Ben's father built. It's where Ben will be buried when he dies. But for Ben and Melissa, this place is not just about loss. It's about celebrating life.
SASSE: January 25th became our celebrate not death day. And we walk through the cemetery for a few hours and pray and express gratitude for the fact she didn't die that day.
TAPPER: And you have plots there, right?
SASSE: We do.
M. SASSE: It's a beautiful place.
TAPPER (voice-over): The day Ben is referring to was back in 2023.
M. SASSE: Actually, it's been two years. I mean, we're so needy of attention, but I was diagnosed with epilepsy, and we don't know if that's from the strokes or if it's just a new thing.
SASSE: She was averaging a big seizure every six to eight weeks for a year plus. And in the last 17 months, we've only had one. So we were doing, you know, eight a year. And we've had one in over a year now. It's been awesome.
TAPPER: Because of new medication or?
SASSE: Yes.
TAPPER: Oh, wow.
SASSE: Anti-seizure sedatives at night. And counteract it with uppers in the morning. And she can manage through with no seizures right now.
TAPPER (voice-over): The drugs gave Melissa her life back. And now two years later a new experimental drug is giving Ben his life back. At least for now.
SASSE: So I take a super dose of poison by pills at bedtime, and it messes you up. So I take them literally five minutes before I get in bed. I start taking morphine about an hour and a half before bed, so I'm getting kind of dizzy, woozy, zonked high. And then right at bedtime, I take my few hundred milligrams of daraxonrasib.
TAPPER (voice-over): It's a pill some are calling a cancer miracle. You see, pancreatic cancer is considered one of the deadliest. Many, like Ben, don't get diagnosed until it has already spread. People are often given just months to live. This drug is extending that to more than a year.
SASSE: Pancreatic cancer has been thought to be undruggable. The oncology community calls it the greasy ball. The molecule that is pancreatic cancer is like a golf ball with hard dimples but no crevices, no way to get a drug in. All these molecules evidently have a chaperon molecule nearby. And this rock star researcher who, you know, was one of the co-founders of Revolutions Medicine, had the idea that maybe you'd find a way to take the molecular glue and glue your chaperon molecule to the pancreatic cancer, and you create a crevice, and you lock the drug in there.
And then they experiment it with 500 molecules and they found one, this daraxonrasib drug. And all of a sudden pancreatic cancer is a little bit responsive.
TAPPER: The drug you're taking, it's essentially poisoning the cancer in you?
SASSE: Correct. And so over the course of the five months I've been on this drug, my tumors have shrunk by 80 percent.
TAPPER: Wow.
SASSE: Now, this is great news, but not, you know, ultimate news because tumors find a way to work their way around chemo over time.
[20:55:07]
And so we're getting amazing response, but it won't last forever.
TAPPER: Can I ask you a question that might be too much? And if it is --
SASSE: Sure.
TAPPER: How -- have the doctors explained to you how death will come when and if -- well, it's not enough if, when it comes if presuming that this is what happens? Like do they say like you're going to go to bed one night and just not wake up? Is it going to be like a couple days of intense pain? I mean, have they? I'm so sorry.
SASSE: No, I mean, we're all facing the death sentence, and so it's not an inappropriate question at all. The way death ultimately comes is your systems just stop working because there's not enough oxygen in your brain to tell the systems to run.
TAPPER (voice-over): Doctors don't know when that will be. Not only have his tumor shrunk by an amazing 80 percent, but the number of cancer cells in his body have been dramatically reduced. While Ben's diagnosis remains terminal, the drug has been a wild success because it has extended Ben's life well beyond what they initially predicted.
Was there a moment when you, I mean, it sounds like there is where you're like, OK, I've lived past three months, OK, I lived past four months, and now here we are a few days past six months?
SASSE: Yes.
TAPPER: I mean, do you mark those days?
SASSE: Definitely. I feel amazing gratitude for every extra dinner with my wife and son and, you know, going to College World Series.
TAPPER (voice-over): While we were on the field between games, Ben took a minute to talk to West Virginia's Armani Guzman.
SASSE: That was that. It was a hell of a performance.
TAPPER (voice-over): Who had stolen home base in the opening game of the series. It's not a common achievement and West Virginia ultimately lost the game but it was a meaningful moment, not unlike the extra time at home that Ben has stolen during the struggles.
M. SASSE: So we're incredibly grateful for this trial medication that he's doing pretty well at six months.
SASSE: Tim Keller, the pastor who's in our denomination who happened to die of pancreatic cancer a few years ago, said pancreatic cancer is wicked. I would never wish it on anybody, and yet I would never want to go back to the stage of life where I didn't know the prayer that flowed from pancreatic cancer. And I feel that, which is I hate this disease. I hate that I'm sick all the time. My abdomen doesn't work.
And yet it's pretty great to be freed from the illusion that I was self-sufficient, that I could ever have a warehouse, a storehouse that was big enough, that was going to insulate me from my weakness and my finitude. There's a whole bunch of truth that comes from suffering, in that it frees us from the self-distraction and from the self-idolatry. You can bank a job or a paycheck or a set of accomplishments.
And when you're really sick and you're on the floor of the shower and you're in a lot of pain, it's pretty great to have to tell yourself the truth about bank account really doesn't matter. So in this suffering, it's been clarifying because you get back to 101 stuff.
TAPPER (voice-over): Like with Breck at that ballpark or with Melissa by the river at their home.
At the risk of intruding, how is your marriage?
SASSE: She's so lucky.
M. SASSE: I'm so lucky.
TAPPER: This is the challenge of challenges.
M. SASSE: Well, I guess when you make that commitment on the wedding day, for better or for worse, has come true in a lot of ways. And that's not unromantic in the sense that it's almost more comforting and more romantic, because you have that sense that no matter what happens, that's going to be there, then it's very comforting. And so we made that commitment and we mean it. Divorce is not an option. So then you can relax in that. And so through this sickness we know that we'll be there for each other.
TAPPER: In a situation that a lot of us have wondered about, if you found out that you only had a certain amount of time to live, what would you do? How would you spend those days? Now, obviously you're spending a lot of the time fighting. Fighting what's coming or what fighting what you have, but it also is just provides a perspective on you are actually living that. You're actually living that.
And this is what you're choosing to do, spend those days talking about meaning, loving. How do you see it?
SASSE: I mean, this week feels like a pretty incredible blessing to go to the College World Series. What would you rather do? We're getting to break bread together a lot of nights. We get to -- we get to read together. We're doing some work. We've been doing a little bit of landscaping.
Martin Luther has the great line. If you knew the world was going to end tomorrow, what would you do? And his answer was, you plant a tree.
[21:00:00]
