The contrast could not be starker. At around 8am on Thursday, British police swooped on the Sandringham royal estate to arrest the former prince Andrew after allegations that he had shared confidential material with the late US sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. It was a seismic shock for the monarchy.

A week earlier Pam Bondi, the top US law enforcement official, was asked how many of Epstein’s co-conspirators her department had indicted, or whether she would give state attorneys general access to evidence to build further cases. She refused to answer.

As for Donald Trump, whose name appears in the Epstein files thousands of times, albeit without any clear incrimination, Bondi insisted that he was “the greatest president in American history” and admonished members of Congress for not talking about the soaring stock market instead.

It is a tale of two nations. In one, the establishment has been shaken to the core by the Epstein files, with a member of the royal family arrested for the first time in nearly 400 years and a prime minister fighting for survival. In the other, “the Epstein class” – in Senator Jon Ossoff’s phrase – has faced public opprobrium but little by way of a legal or political reckoning with the US president, yet again, apparently getting off scot-free.

“Other countries, like the Brits, can hold their leaders and high-profile people accountable, yet here in the United States we continue to somehow obscure the facts,” says Olivia Troye, a former national security official. “We have a Department of Justice that is complicit in all of this and we can’t seem to hold people accountable in the United States of America. What message does that say to the world?”

Only one person has been arrested or convicted in the US in connection with the activities of Epstein. Ghislaine Maxwell, his ex-girlfriend and accomplice, is serving a 20-year prison sentence after being found guilty in 2021 of providing minor girls to the wealthy financier, who died in a New York jail cell in 2019 while awaiting trial for sex trafficking.

There were hopes that the long-awaited release of the Epstein files would deliver further justice for the survivors of his abuse. And they did make highly uncomfortable reading for the Epstein class, a global network of powerful politicians, business executives, academics and celebrities.

Several prominent Americans resigned from high-profile positions when the files revealed they maintained relations with Epstein after his 2008 conviction for sex offences. Former treasury secretary Larry Summers quit the board of the OpenAI foundation, billionaire Thomas Pritzker left the executive chairmanship of Hyatt hotels and lawyer Kathryn Ruemmler announced her departure from Goldman Sachs.

The material also inflicted reputational damage on the Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, who cancelled a speech at an artificial intelligence summit in India on Thursday; Casey Wasserman, the top US official overseeing the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles; wellness influencer Peter Attia; and former president Bill Clinton who, along with his wife Hillary, is set to testify to a congressional panel next week.

But no one other than Maxwell has faced legal consequences. Indeed, no further prosecutions are likely. Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, told CNN: “In July the Department of Justice said that we had reviewed the Epstein files and there was nothing in there that allowed us to prosecute anybody. And that’s where we remain for what we’ve seen and what we’ve released from the Epstein files.”

That explanation has not satisfied some members of Congress who accuse Bondi’s justice department of dragging its feet.

Senator Ruben Gallego, an Arizona Democrat, has blamed the lack of action in the US squarely on Trump, once a close friend of Epstein. He posted on X: “Countries across the world are holding their Epstein class accountable. It isn’t happening in America because we have a pedo protector in the Oval Office running a government coverup for him and his friends.”

Trump fought for months to prevent release of the Epstein files but eventually signed the law passed by Congress requiring their publication. The 79-year-old Republican’s name appears in the files repeatedly but he has not been charged with any wrongdoing.

Trump was asked on Thursday if any Epstein associates in the US will “wind up in handcuffs”. Trump sidestepped the question, reiterating his claim that he personally had been “totally exonerated” while calling Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s arrest a “very sad thing”.

Critics say Trump’s passivity has been thrown into sharp relief by Britain and other countries going to extraordinary lengths to institute accountability.

Kurt Bardella, a political commentator and former congressional aide, says: “You would think that the entirety of the global community could get behind the idea that trafficking underage women and trading secrets and money is not a good thing. Apparently everyone has gotten that memo except the United States of America.

“While this goes on, and while those at the highest echelons of power here in America are not held accountable, we have zero moral authority to tell any country in this world what they should or shouldn’t be doing. We don’t get to tell Iran what to do. We don’t get to tell the Middle East what peace should look like. We don’t get to police anybody because we’re not willing to police ourselves.”

The divergence between the UK and US does not end in the courtroom. The British prime minister, Keir Starmer, had to fight off questions about his judgment after the papers revealed that Peter Mandelson, the man he appointed ambassador to the US, had a more extensive and closer relationship with Epstein than was previously disclosed. Mandelson was fired last September and is now under police investigation after allegations that he leaked government material to Epstein.

Compare and contrast with Howard Lutnick, the US commerce secretary. Lutnick claimed that he vowed never to “be in a room” with Epstein following a 2005 incident in which the financier showed Lutnick a massage table at his townhouse and made a sexually suggestive comment. Yet emails show that Lutnick visited Epstein’s private island for lunch in 2012 and invited him to a fundraiser in 2015. “We had lunch on the island – that is true – for an hour,” Lutnick admitted to Congress earlier this month.

He had been caught in a lie and Democrats demanded his resignation. In Britain and many other countries around the world, that outcome would have been inevitable. But Trump has no intention of handing his foes such a win.

Troye, a former homeland security and counter-terrorism adviser to Mike Pence, commented: “You have the former prince Andrew being taken into a police station and yet we have cabinet-level people that remain in their positions and there doesn’t seem to be any accountability happening there. That is how deep this rot goes.

“These people have continued to lie repeatedly along the way and then new evidence shows up and the American people can see for themselves that these people have lied about what’s happened here. They continued to engage with this individual, even though they knew that he was a convicted pedophile.”

Trump himself is on much safer ground than Starmer, who was elected precisely because of his milquetoast propriety, seen as an antidote to the shabby Conservative years; any hint of scandal destroys that core identity. Trump, by contrast, has plunged so many ethical depths as to have a numbing effect; his presence in the files was long expected and had little shock value.

But there may still be a reckoning to come. His rightwing base has long been obsessed with the Epstein saga and the belief the financier oversaw a sex-trafficking ring for the world’s elite. Some in that base are angry at how the release of the files has been mishandled. They are not likely to vote against Trump’s party in the November midterm elections but they may well not vote at all.

Mountbatten-Windsdor, who denies any wrongdoing, has been held accountable by the long arm of the law. Trump and his allies may yet face a different kind of justice at the ballot box.

Rick Wilson, a co-founder of the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, says the president is “facing political disaster” with Democrats on track to take control of the House of Representatives and maybe even the Senate. “And then the subpoenas will start going out, lawyers will be hired, and House committee rooms will be wired for cameras and sound.

“The intensity of the investigations into the Epstein cover-up, redactions and omissions will surpass any previous investigation in the history of the United States and they will blow this wide open. Any insulation anyone thinks they have will be ripped away.”