What happened to Mike Huckabee?

Once, there was a Mike Huckabee who, as governor of Arkansas, was pretty darn progressive on education, who expanded Medicaid for children, who raised taxes and was way, way ahead of the curve on criminal justice reform.

This same person, when he ran for president in 2008, was pilloried by his fellow social conservatives for perceived deficits of outrage on the issues on which they agreed.

After the 2003 Supreme Court decision striking down the Texas sodomy law that had criminalized homosexual sex, for example, Mr. Huckabee said on his radio show that the decision “probably was appropriate” since any law that “prohibits private behavior among adults” would be too hard to enforce. Ann Coulter called him “one of those pro-sodomy, pro-gay marriage, pro-evolution evangelical Christians,” in part because he thought evolution should be taught in school along with creationism. On social rather than economic grounds, Rush Limbaugh insisted that the lifelong pro-lifer was “not a conservative.”

He was plenty conservative, but with what some on the right saw as an excessive leavening of compassion. Not surprising, since he’d spent a lifetime in the ministry showing up for people he might not even know at the worst moments of their lives, along with his wife, whose passions included building houses for Habitat for Humanity and sleeping under bridges with the homeless one night a year to draw attention to their problems.

So, when did Mike Huckabee, a conservative culture warrior with a heart, become the man who, a few days ago, said that President Barack Obama’ would march Israelis “to the door of the oven" with his Iran deal?

When did the man who knows how much it hurts to be looked down on, based on all he’s written and said about his own experiences with class, turn into someone who callously joked in February that he wished he could have passed himself off as transgender when it came time for gym class back in high school so he could have showered with the girls?

When did the man who gave a great speech in 2007, at the 50year commemoration of Governor Orval Faubus’s shameful refusal to integrate Little Rock’s Central High School, morph into the one who, after nine AfricanAmerican Christians were killed in a Charleston church last month, punted over whether South Carolina should take down the Confederate flag flying on statehouse grounds?

Or the one who, despite his differences with Donald Trump on undocumented immigrants — as governor, Mr. Huckabee took on his own party to see that their children got an education — has hailed Mr. Trump as, in many ways, a late-breaking fellow traveler? “A lot of the things that he’s saying,” Mr. Huckabee told Fox News, “those are things that, in many ways, I’ve been saying those for eight years, before he was a Republican.”.

This new Mike Huckabee is a creature of this primary season. Yes, he’s always been given to hyperbole. And long before Mr. Trump tried to freeze out the Des Moines Register, Mr. Huckabee stiff-armed the Arkansas Times out of pique with its coverage. And way back in 1992 he accused a political opponent of being a pornographer because the man supported the National Endowment for the Arts.

But now, Mr. Huckabee “has gone further than he’s ever gone before,” says Hoyt Purvis, a journalism professor at the University of Arkansas, “and his campaign is more and more aimed, not just at the Tea Party, but the hard, hard right. I’ve been surprised at the extremes he’s gone to lately, and can only think he seems like a candidate who thinks he’s got to do this to get some notice.”

Has Donald Trump swallowed the old Mike Huckabee whole?

“He was a lot more measured when he was back here,” says longtime observer Art English, professor emeritus of the University of Arkansas. “A lot of Democrats would say he was a pretty good governor.”

Republican state Sen. David Sanders says it wasn’t as if Mr. Huckabee’s comment on the Iran deal came out of nowhere, because “he was pro-Israel before it was mainstream.” But then again, “this is the year of Donald Trump, and in a 16-person race, is that having an effect? I think so; why else do we see Lindsey Graham trying to destroy a cellphone or Rand Paul taking a chainsaw to the tax code?”

But, by definition, Mr. Huckabee can’t out-Trump Trump. He’s got his own brand of off-the-cuff plain-talking, but it’s never had the edge that Mr. Trump’s has.

In 2012, almost every Republican candidate had at least a brief turn at being the favorite, because the eventual nominee wasn’t his party’s first choice but its last. Though few expect Mr. Trump to be the nominee, the opposite is true this time, with only one GOP candidate hogging more than his share of the attention.

Taking on the best-polling candidate this time — which Mr. Trump has become after breaking every rule in the campaign playbook and in Republican orthodoxy — will require not an imitator but an anti-Trump, someone who is much more like the real Mike Huckabee.